As I briefly wrote here five years ago, I've long thought the airport in Oakland was amongst the most antiquated looking of the airports on the west coast I've flown through. Its main terminal seems not to have been updated since about 1973.
Which makes sense: neither has the mindset of the people who work in it.
The lamps already went off in Sydney earlier this year for an hour; San Francisco and Los Angeles will be joining them soon. Recently, Variey described this L.A. incident, which foreshadows the event rather nicely:
Some 300 people gathered on Tuesday night at the Brentwood home of CAA's David O'Connor and his wife, Lona Williams, anxious to see the guest of honor, Bill Clinton.At least this hour of darkness will be predictible, on oh, so many levels.Then the power went out --- in the entire neighborhood --- putting this Hillary Clinton fund-raiser into near total darkness.
The only light came from candles and some battery operated lanterns, which were shined on Clinton when he spoke in the backyard pool area. That helped, but it was still hard to see guests. And with no electricity, and therefore no microphone, it wasn't always easy to hear, according to a guest.
"There are a lot of great things about the modern world," Clinton said, according to the guest. "Predictable electricity may not be one of them."
Jack D. Lail uses my "Atlas Mugged" article as a jumping off point to explore the future of blogs actually run by newpapers, including a great quote from this Gawker article:
Nearly all newspaper websites mistakenly segregate their blogs off with the other blogs. They're organizing by form, not by content. (The Times does a better job, both promoting blog posts on the front page and integrating each blog's content into existing sections.)Indeed. Here's how to do it right, which, needless to say, has everything to do with the blog's editor than the paper itself, though it would require some work to translate some of the blog's elements to one that was devoted to more serious topics, such as a blog covering the police or fire beat, which would seem a natural for the medium.Readers just don't come to a newspaper's website looking for a messy passel of blogs. They come looking for sports, or fashion, no matter what "form" it's in. Old newspaper editors may think blogs are some crazy different variety of publication; readers don't.
9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But...And thus, the Copperhead Conjunction rears its ugly head yet again.
Update: I'm absolutely certain that Andrew Rosenthal couldn't tell you what Thomas Friedman's politics are, either.
As always, Ace explains all:
Breaking a big story takes work. And a lot of luck. And even with both you might never manage it.And don't worry--as long as he knows your politics are somewhere on the left, your editor will never ask you what your ideology is.There's an easier rout, of course. If you can't be good at your job, at least you can become a superstar, at least among those who count, by being an unabashed partisan.
Profiling Bernie Goldberg In 2003, I wrote:
Another strange thing has started happening as well -- in the past, media elites denounced any claims of a liberal bias in the news with a shrug and a "who, us? We're not liberals. We're not leftwing. We're objective and neutral. No biases here!" More and more, as we'll shortly see, the media are going on the record (Brock, Gore and Franken, notwithstanding) that it leans pretty heavily towards the left.Four years later, we're witnessing the ongoing fallout of that change from in attitude that's a hangover from the early days of the 20th century.
To witness how dramatically a culture and its elite media can change in 40 years, and how a grown-up culture can vanish over those decades, compare how Newsweek described the Beatles to its readers when they first arrived on our shores with how the magazine reports on a topic that would have been inconceivable to the middlebrow overculture of 1964. First, Newsweek’s February 24, 1964 cover story on the Fab Four:
Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah!") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments."As Bryce Zabel of the Instant History blog, which collects classic Time and Newsweek cover stories and highlights their accompanying stories correctly notes:
It's hard to believe, isn't it? The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasn't just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty.And at least forty years ago, Newsweek’s writers had the courage to stakeout an opinion and stick with it. Flash-forward 43 years. Here’s how Newsweek’s Sarah Kliff covers the loony the Vegan dating scene:
It might sound counterintuitive; after all, neither group eats meat. But for many vegans—who also eschew animal products like the dairy and eggs eaten by vegetarians—love may not be enough to conquer ideology. “I’m in a relationship with a murderer,” bemoans Carl, one of many vegans who wrote in to the “Vegan Freak” podcast for romantic advice. Carl, who didn’t give his last name, says his girlfriend is a regular vegetarian, and their differences are becoming a major source of tension. In the vegan world that’s not an uncommon dilemma. Bob Torres, one of the show’s hosts, says that dating and relationships are two of the most popular topics on the podcast, which deals with all things vegan.Check out the photo of Torres that accompanies the article—it’s a posed shot in which he clearly chose to be photographed wearing a black t-shirt that highlights both of his arms festooned with tattoos. He may believe that meat is “murder” (a stolen concept if there ever was one, unless Fido and Elsie the cow are actually reading your copy of Newsweek), but he’s certainly not above mutilating his own body.
And note that with the exception of the quotation marks around “murder” only in the article’s subhead, which very likely was written not by the author, but her editor, Newsweek comments not a jot of opinion of their own on any of these topics in the actual body of the article, unlike its circa-1964 writers. Presumably they're either in agreement on their interviewees, or they risk offending the delicate sensibilities of their remaining readers. But then, as I noted recently, Newsweek asked Diana West, "Are Adults Acting More Like Teenagers?"on their Website, as if there's some doubt about this trend.
As for my opinion on all this? I’d be happy to share it with you next time we meet here. In the meantime, one video is worth thousands of Newsweek’s increasingly addle-minded words.
In 2002, Charles Krauthammer famously wrote, "To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." You'll find no better follow up to the second half of Krauthammer's dictum than to read Harry Stein's review in City Journal of Bob Shrum's new autobiography:
No Excuses, the memoir by veteran Democratic operative Bob Shrum, is one of the best books about politics ever written—by the worst person in the business today. In the course of its nearly 500 pages, Shrum is brutally, entertainingly honest about the behind-the-scenes behavior of many of the most important political figures of the past two generations, at least on the Democratic side. He also reveals himself as manipulative and petty, egomaniacal and deeply insecure.For numerous additional examples of politics as a religious crusade, read the whole thing.But what is ultimately most alarming about Shrum is that, as this era’s leading Democratic guru, he has had such influence over all these years in shaping—make that distorting—the public discourse. For if there was any doubt, his own unapologetic testimony makes manifest his contempt and loathing for those who fail to embrace his own paleo-liberal worldview. This is a man who credits his ideological foes with not the slightest decency, but rather sees them as an evil to be purged from public life. And in service of this noble mission, no behavior seems beyond the pale.
John Hinderaker asks if Hillary is the second coming of George McGovern, and explores Democrats and demogrants.
AP sports headline: “Jason, John Garrett coach against brother Judd when Cowboys meet Rams”
Wow, this could be one interesting game! To be fair, the Brothers Judd run a helluva Website, but I'm not sure how we'll they'll stand up against the Cowboys' high-powered offense on Sunday...
National Review Online is all Treked-up this weekend to boldly go where no conservative Website has gone before. K'plah!
For the debut episode of PJM Political yesterday on XM, I spoke with Michael Barone about the various initiatives floating around to change the Electoral College in time for the 2008 election. Barone was pretty dubious about most of these efforts becoming law by next year. Bill Bradley, PJM Political's host, writes that the effort by the California GOP, one of the potentially biggest reforms, given CA's 55 electoral votes is quickly losing steam.
If you missed the links from Glenn Reynolds and James Lileks, the podcast version of PJM Political on XM satellite radio is now available online at Pajamas HQ.
Sid Blumenthal believes that RatherGate was a Karl Rove operation.
The amazing thing is that he's more right than even he can imagine!
The New York Daily News:
One ardent Obama supporter (who declined to give his name because he works in politics) says he'll attend both the rally and the after-party, and he doesn't expect to be going home alone.Fair enough. Of course, the flipside, as John Derbyshire noted a while back, is that "Water will find its level, physical states return to equilibrium sooner or later, and all lefty women, whatever attributes they may have started out with, revert to type at last."He's confident for a reason.
"Let's face it: Leftie girls are easy," he says.
Why yes, that is me on XM Satellite Radio, interviewing Michael Barone and Jonah Goldberg, on Pajamas' new hour-long show, PJM Political, in-between producing the show. It's been an absolutely insane month assembling all of the elements of the show but needless to say, I hope you'll tune-in each week, on XM's channel #130, the POTUS '08 network. This week, we feature:
Update: The XM show and yours truly is mentioned briefly at about 5:50 into the above interview with Roger and Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters and Blog Talk Radio, which will be one of the sources of content for the XM show.
The New York Post notes:
In his most detailed comments on the Iraq war, Mayor Bloomberg last night suggested the United States was in the same difficult position as the British in the Revolutionary War - facing a determined band of insurgents.Which dovetails absolutely perfectly with comments that Michael Moore and NBC's Brian Williams have previously made.Bloomberg said the comparison occurred to him when he visited his mother recently and was driving through Lexington, Mass., where a scrubby group of farmers rose up against a well-trained militia more than 200 years ago.
"We're the British," the mayor said during an interview with Tom Brokaw at Cooper Union, part of a series featuring potential presidential contenders hosted by former Gov. Mario Cuomo.
After reading all that, I need to hit the hookah bar.
Thank you for smoking, Matt Lewis writes:
But what about the growing Hookah Parlor Gap?
I didn't watch the Dem debate last night. But, as Marc Ambinder reports, every candidate except Hillary and Obama said they would favor a national ban on smoking ...
Hey, if Reuters' Adnan Hajj can rework the Beirut cityscape for a more dramatic photo, why can't a Reuters reporter insert himself into his own story? Besides, didn't Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe do that same sort of stuff all the time in 1960s Esquire articles? Of course, they were writing features, not hard news, but, hey, why quibble when you work for the one-time "Rolls-Royce of news agencies".
This line by veteran CIA man Mark Lowenthal sounds like something that M*A*S*H's favorite bumbling spy would utter:
Last night, Hugh had longtime CIA employee and George Tenet advisor Mark Lowenthal on as a guest. At the end of the interview, Lowenthal provided an unintentionally hilarious (albeit chilling) summation of the CIA’s pathos. While discussing Iran’s path to nuclear weapons, Lowenthal posited that the Mullahs remain seven years from “mission accomplished”. Hugh asked if we could afford to take the chance that the CIA’s “guess” on this matter was correct. Lowenthal bristled, reminding Hugh that at “the CIA we don’t guess. We estimate.”As Dean Barnett asks, "Does the 'I' Really Stand for Intelligence?"I feel so much better! Because there’s such an enormous difference between guessing and estimating. And, let’s face it, the CIA’s track record on recent estimations is rock solid. Oh sure, they severely underestimated Saddam’s proximity to nuclear weaponry in the early 1990’s. And the Agency over-estimated Iraq’s WMD capabilities in the run-up to the Iraq War. And regarding Al Qaeda’s plans and abilities, the Agency was effectively clueless. But I’m sure the Agency has made some estimates in the past few decades that haven’t completely stunk.
Lowenthal’s insistence on highlighting the meaningless distinction between “guessing” and “estimating” is revealing. The CIA actually believes its own bull-hockey. Even though they’ve collectively blown every big one for the past 15 years, they still believe they have insight that no one else has.
Greg Gutfeld's not afraid to fight for his woman:
So in today's New York Times, a paper I enjoy reading while having my problem areas tweezed and sculpted into a topiary, I was shocked to find that Maureen Dowd had mentioned me in her column about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She took issue with me calling him a foul-smelling fruitbat - a description I know is factual, since I have confirmation from insiders that he smells, and is a fruitbat. She called my reaction, "small-minded," and "heavy-handed," which in my mind means I have both a tiny brain, and big hands. Hey Maureen... you know what they say about men with tiny brains and big hands.If only we could get Greg to work his magic charm on Christiane Amanpour as well.She then uses President Reagan as a shining example of how to deal with our adversaries - an odd thing considering Dowd and her paper always saw Reagan as a big joke. She fails to mention that Reagan managed to scare the pants off the Commies, because they knew he meant business.
How I hate that Dowd and I have gotten off on the wrong foot. I dreamt of the day that she would finally notice me. But instead of calling me up to go hot-tubbing with Frank Rich, she chastizes me for making fun of an Iranian madman. Maureen, what does he have that I don't? Is it the hair? The Jacket? The desired destruction of the Jews? It's his degree in traffic management, isn't it?
I can change Maureen. Don't write me off just yet. Just tell me what to do. PICK ME, MAUREEN! CHOOSE ME! Mahmoud will chew you up and spit you out. HE'S GOT HOES IN DIFFERENT AREA CODES, MAUREEN! And he treats them so badly. They don't even get basic cable. Quite frankly Maureen, he's just not that into you.
BUT I AM. I'll wait. When he's done with you, just call me, and I'll be there. We'll have margaritas. I'll even wear the jacket. I won't like it, but I'll do it. For you.
Mike Gravel sticks it to The Man:
Another element of the talkathon that marks the candidates' vulnerability in the general election is the candidates' conformity on the desirability of public schools educating eight-year-olds on homosexual relationships. At one point last night -- was it during the discussion of Social Security? -- one of the candidates referred to the unreality of the talkathon, but bankruptcy seemed to me the more appropriate metaphor. Senator Gravel found a way to salute himelf for his personal and business bankruptcies:Video of Gravel first staring down the credit card companies and then casting off his debts for the empowerment of the American people, here.“Well, first off, if you want to make a judgment of who can be the greediest people in the world when they get to public office, you can just look at the people up here,” Gravel said in a nod to his fellow candidates.Byron York salutes Gravel:“Now, you say the condo business,” he continued. “I will tell you, Donald Trump has been bankrupt 100 times. So I went bankrupt once in business. And the other – who did I bankrupt? I stuck the credit card companies with $90,000 worth of bills, and they deserved it – “
“They deserved it,” Gravel repeated, “and I used the money to finance the empowerment of the American people with a national initiative.”
Gravel’s answer was unprecedented in the history of these debates, and, if nothing else, it seemed guaranteed to win him at least a share of the insolvent vote, even among those who have stuck credit card companies for debts far more prosaic than empowering the American people with national initiatives.But York misses Gravel's magnanimity. He went bankrupt for us! It seemed to me an emblematic moment.
Well over a year away from the election, here are two rather divergent predictions for November '08's outcome to choose from:
Frankly, my money right now is on the former scenario. By next fall, the past few weeks' events could likely be ancient history, tossed far down the collective memory hole by a legacy media whose chief player gives sweetheart ad deals to Moveon.
Allahpundit explores the boffo box office--which a different kind of PC industry, politically correct Hollywood, would kill for--of Microsoft's Halo 3, which ties in with an apt comment Glenn Reynolds made a while back:
It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't. I'd be interested to see more analysis on that subject.Meanwhile, James Lileks has online video of the haves and have-nots of the videogame world as Halo 3's launch approached.
Ahh, but what sort of space would be worthy to qualify as the perfect rec room in which to play such an awesomely awesome game? There can be only choice:
This.
MIT's Technology Review looks at the processors of the near future--expect "Massively multicore processors" as their CPUs. And as I wrote earlier this year, boatloads of RAM, as well.
Reuters: "Gore: Bush should follow Reagan's lead on climate".
Bush should propose a compromise with Gore: he'll begin to act more like a conservative president from the 1980s, if Gore will resume acting like the more conservative southern Democrat senator he was during the same time period, before his meltdown occured.
Calvin Ross of the Napa Valley Register checks in on Andrew Keen:
Lately many elite journalists have been attacking blogs, especially politically liberal blogs, as "vitriolic," "rabid" and "crude." Keen went to great pains to offer the "real" journalism of the Wall St. Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post as examples of what blogging is not.Go figure: Keen is assuming that responsible readers won't be able to distinguish between bloggers who produce responsible work, and those who manufacture fake news...on a comedy show hosted by an actor who's producing fake news by sending up the typical network anchorman.He said on the "Colbert Report" last month that "I think we need objective, professional journalists who responsibly collect the news rather than anonymous bloggers often in the pay of corporations and foreign governments.
Update: Related thoughts on the faux news show where Colbert got his start.
Mike Kinsley once noted that a major gaffe only occurs in Washington when someone speaks the truth. Jonah Goldberg notices an curious remark by Katie Couric, speaking yesterday at the National Press Club, which fits that bill rather nicely:
“The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.”The Today Show, which Katie anchored for many years, is aired each morning by the National Broadcasting Corporation. I wonder if Katie is aware which nation its business name refers to?
Related thoughts here.
(H/T: I/P)
Update: "Couric doesn't want to call herself an American, but she also doesn't want people to think she's unpatriotic. What exactly are we supposed to think, Katie?"
Dean Barnett illustrates the story of the week with an incredible Photoshop. Given where it's running and the iconic movie it's parodying, it can't help but remind me of one of my own Photoshoppery efforts along similar lines from a couple of years ago.
Two of the recurring themes on our blog is the flattening of history where the modern left seems endlessly trapped in the early 1970s, along with the concurrent return of the Rousseauvian primitive who probably thinks of himself as politically "progressive", and yet would like to see society move far, far backwards in time. Or as Pete Seeger once told the New York Times:
I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.Reading James Lileks' Tuesday Bleat and then Mark Steyn's Maclean's article on Hollywood's, err, new golden age (as he puts it) back to back illustrates--in spades--how little the themes they address have changed amongst the left in nearly forty years. Not to mention Tom Wolfe's "Starting From Zero" motif.
A year ago I wrote, "What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow?" It looks like the disease is spreading beyond its incubation on the Garden State's campuses out into its signature farmland.
"My name is Shiri Negari and I would like to speak at Columbia too, but I was murdered when Iran gave money to Hamas to blow up the bus I was on."
The Washington Times' Robert Stacy McCain emailed yesterday to remind us of this post from the early days of our blog, which is also referenced in the above link.
(Via Hot Air.)
Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, makes a terrific observation:
Rod Dreher, an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has posed an interesting question in this blog post on Beliefnet. He begins by offering a passage from a book about local communities in Chicago in the 1950s in which the author, Alan Ehrenhalt, writes about how history is written. It is a commonplace, and therefore a suspect notion, that “history is written by the winners.” Ehrenhalt suggests that, more often than not, it is written by the dissenters.We also tend to think that there is only One Version of History. As 20th century-style mass media and the overculture it created continues to fracture (which I touched upon in "Atlas Mugged"), expect--for both good and bad--an increasing number of niche groups to have their own take on history as well.This is a much more useful insight and one that fits with other things we know or intuit. By “history,” I take Ehrenhalt to be referring not just to academic tomes or schoolbooks but to the public memories and attitudes that evolve with respect to past times and events. For example, we have all learned to think of the 1950s as a time of materialism and conformity and cultural blandness. This has become our shared historical viewpoint. But who told us that? Wasn’t it precisely those who weren’t, or worked very hard not to seem to be, like that?
(Via Kathy Shaidle.)
Screenwriter William Goldman once provided the birds' eye view of Hollywood's product quality when he quipped, “Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood”.
On the ground level, Libertas reviews an individual film that demonstrates that never-ending downward spiral in action: "It’s never easy to start a review with a mouthful of crow, but I owe Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney an apology: It is possible to make a film worse than The Good German."
"Helicopter Rabies Baiting Program To Begin".
I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what that means. However, I would personally advise not baiting any rabid helicopters. But hey, that's just me.
Hot Air and Pajamas HQ check in on "Mahmoud's Manhattan Moment".
Glenn Reynolds links to a post that contains a quote from 1978 which accurately predicted the death of the printed newspaper as the online world took off.
But long before the dreaded Days of Disco, Arthur C. Clarke made a similar prediction during the Johnson era.
As I wrote in "Atlas Mugged"--and thank you for all of the posts linking to it!--Clarke, Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler had all made predictions as early as the mid-1960s which predicted the demise of the newspaper as a physical medium. And like the quote from the 1970s linked to above, they all went unheeded by the newspaper industry, which is paying the price today.
Or...life imitates Ian Fleming. In the 1964 film version of Goldfinger, James Bond has this exchange with the eponymous Gert Frobe, after he describes his plan to invade Fort Knox to 007:
Bond: You'll kill 60,000 people uselessly.John Stephenson spots Ron Paul uttering a surprisingly similar dismissive quote concerning a real-life terrorist incident that had nothing to do with SPECTRE, SMERSH, or Hollywood:Goldfinger: Hah. American motorists kill that many every two years.
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul contends that the federal government has overreacted by limiting personal freedom in the wake of terrorist attacks six years ago, noting more people die on U.S. highways in less than a month’s time compared to the number who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.With ever-classy Ronfinger, every quote he utters turns to lead, not gold.“We have been told that we have to give up our freedoms in order to be safe because terrorism is such a horrible event,” Paul said today to more than 1,000 supporters who attended a rally at a downtown Chicago hotel ballroom.
“A lot fewer lives died on 9/11 than they do in less than a month on our highways, but once again, who owns the highways? Do we own the highways? No. It’s a government institution you know. …We need to put all this in perspective.”
Back in November of 2004, after the horrific brawl in the stands of the NBA's Detroit Pistons game at their home arena (in "New Fallujah", as Rush Limbaugh dubbed the city after watching the incident), I compared it to footage of sporting events from what seems like centuries ago--the mid-1960s:
A few years ago, when NFL Films began running its Inside The Vault series on ESPN, I was struck by how conservative and dignified most mid-'60s fans looked. There was little or no team merchandise available, so fans arrived to stadiums on Sunday looking like they had just come from church (which many no doubt had), rather than wearing rainbow-colored wigs, Darth Vader Helmets, or cheeseheads. No doubt, the games had their share of hecklers, but I'll bet that in general, fans of the past were much more subdued than today's members of Raiders Nation, the Philadelphia Eagles' crazed fans, or...the courtside fans of the NBA's Detroit Pistons.In "The Death of Sportsmanship", Brent Bozell writes that based on the crowds' constant F-bombing of the Navy's football team at a Rutgers home game, that reset button is nowhere to be found.This isn't meant to exclude the players' guilt in Friday's incident: compare atheletes of the past with today's every-millionare-for-himself attitude. (Indiana's Ron Artest, the player who was banned for the rest of the season for being the pointman in the fight, actually asked for time off before the fight--to promote a rap album he was releasing on his recording label!)
But somehow, and without really thinking consciously about it, society has created the notion that sports arenas are a place for fans to go almost literally insane, rather than merely observe the hometown team in person and cheer for them. But the Pistons/Pacers rumble gives sports--and the public that watches them in person--a chance to hit the control/alt/delete keys and reset.
Charles Johnson links to New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt's op-ed, which admits that the Times did indeed give a sweetheart rate to Move On.org:
In a weasely attempt to throw some blame back on the people who were outraged by this disgusting advertisment, Clark Hoyt echoes the statements of terror groups like Hamas, who only denounce violence because it hurts their image and gives people an “excuse” to “change the subject.”Does the Times itself count as part of that cottage industry?By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”
James Caan: "Nobody should give a s*** about an actor's opinion on politics."
Especially when they let themselves go and--gahh!--wind up looking like this.
At Pajamas HQ, Burt Prelutsky writes:
I can see how Rather may have decided that if he can somehow get his case heard in Los Angeles, he just might win his case in a cakewalk.Meanwhile, Roger Simon has some thoughts on the malignant narcissism of "OJ, Dan Rather and now... Lee Bollinger", the latest successor in a surprisingly long line of Columbia presidents who've never met a radical chic mustache they didn't want to kiss.Still, if I were as old and as rich as Dan Rather, I don’t think I’d want to get myself tangled up with a slew of lawyers. Instead, I’d figure that I’ve already had all the revenge on CBS that I ever really needed. And her name is Katie Couric.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Andrew Meyer's shocking predicament:
As I wrote yesterday, souvenir T-shirts are available in the lobby!
Mark your calendars: October 22nd kicks off "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" on campus, which as Sondra K notes, "will feature a series of events designed to bring a message to these academic communities that challenges most of what students are taught about the so-called War on Terror both in the classroom and on the quad."
Don't miss their poster, which will be lucky to survive two nanoseconds on a typical campus's bulletin board. Especially when there far more important topics to protest.
Like Larry Summers.
(Via Five Feet Of Fury.)
Michael Ledeen joins Austin Bay on this week's Blog Week In Review podcast to discuss his new--and remarkably timely--book.
That's the question that Motor Trend asks, in an item found via the Professor.
Having gotten this rental car up to about 105 MPH about three weeks ago out in the boonies near Pahrump, Nevada (no, really!), I can safely say that it's pretty darn bad.
Nice variation on the usual hackneyed leftwing "I was just kidding" routine.
I'd say 90 days of community service behind the counter of a Thomas Kinkade franchise would be suitable punishment for our budding performance artiste.
Show business entertainers frequently work best as a team: George Burns needed Gracie Allen. Batman had Robin. Starsky needed Hutch. And wherever Dan goes, his spinning sidekick is sure to follow.
...And I feel fine. And thank you for asking!
But as Ann Althouse notes, Naomi Wolf doesn't. Though as another A.A. once wrote about Naomi:
Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce.Andrea Harris directs us to a video of the original farce that started it all, which has been close-captioned for the hearing impaired and viewable here.
To wind things down, Ace asks the natural exit question:
Can anyone explain to me how a liberal university acting to protect the dignity of a liberal Senator is somehow all the blame of the fascist Bush Administration?And as you leave the U of F's auditorium, please pick up a souvenir T-shirt in the lobby.
Jonah Goldberg is "Rather Grateful" that Ted Baxter is suing WJM-TV:
In 2004, at the height of the Dan Rather Memogate story, I wrote in National Review: “Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won’t he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why ... why ... why?So why has Dan returned from his paid retirement on Mark Cuban's HD-Net channel for an additional smiting from Him? Roger L. Simon blames it on "the Culture of the Delusional Celebrity".“There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God.”
With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.
For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series:
Dan Rather passes the buck:
Rather, who along with Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw made up one of the most recognizable triumvirate of network news anchors in history, alleges that he served as little more than a glorified narrator for the Bush report and that it was CBS which forced him to issue a public apology on Sept. 20, 2004—"despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted."Let's parse that second paragraph out:"As defendants well knew, even if any aspect of the broadcast had not been accurate, which has never been established, Mr. Rather was not responsible for any such errors," the suit states.
even if any aspect of the broadcast had not been accurate, which has never been established.Other than via Charles Johnson's infamous "Throbbing Memo" and page 175 of the Thornburgh Report, of course.
And then my favorite line:
Mr. Rather was not responsible for any such errors.Way to pass to buck, Dan! Dan's lawsuit admits that he's Ted Baxter, empty Savile Row suit, and he merely read the copy handed to him by Mary Richards and Murray Slaughter. But then, in the Liar's Poker world of television news, this isn't exactly news, either.
Update: "There’s a distinct possibility of a Queeg-like scene on the witness stand if this thing reaches trial. Imagine him rolling the metal balls in his hand. Imagine it." Unlike John Lennon's utopian fantasies, now that's easy if you try!
Lock up your daughters Geritol, the world's most dangerous oldest punk rock band are coming to your town!
Meanwhile, Woody Allen, the director whose best film dates from this same immediate post-Bicentennial period tells an interviewer:
I'm not a perfectionist. I like to do a film every year and throw a lot of stuff up on the wall; what sticks, sticks, and what doesn't, doesn't. I don't like to make a big production of every film and dine out on the successes and brood over the failures. I just like to make them, take the money and move on with my life.That sad thing is, just like his movies, he's not joking.
(One potential benefit to New Yorkers and their daughters: Woody's threatening to permanently spend his dotage in Europe. Hey, it's worked for Polanski!)
It really does happen like clockwork--first Al drops into L.A. to pick up his Emmy, then this. Incredible!
The week is far from over, but it's already been filled with deja vu all over again. And again.
Or as to paraphrase those parodies of 1930s-era Time magazine, Backwards ran the flashbacks until reeled the mind...
...Where it all will end, knows God!
Update: speaking of "a couple of week links", welcome readers of Jules Crittenden and Don Surber!
As detailed in Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover's Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992, what some may not recall these days about Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah Moment", was that it had little to do with insulting a two-bit virtually unknown rapper, and everything to do with distancing himself from the failed radic chic 1970-era politics of her backer, Jesse Jackson. It was one of many gestures that allowed Clinton to position himself as much more moderate than the average Democrat presidential candidate, and went far towards cementing his candidacy.
Barack Obama has just quietly generated his own Sister Souljah moment. It will be interesting to see if he can capitalize on it further.
Update: Welcome Chicago Sun-Times readers!
Via Libertas:
Director Richard Lester (who also did “A Hard Day’s Night” and is perhaps best known in Hollywood for helming the theatrical blockbuster ”Superman II” after Richard Donner was fired) is going to promote the DVD release in Britain but refuses to do so in America. Why? He won’t enter the country as long as President Bush is in office, an informed source tells me.Lester is 75 years old. His best work was behind him by the time the 1960s ended. He's probably loathing the idea of spending ten hours airborne over water to promote a movie he handed over to the studio 28 years ago. He hasn't made a new film in 16 years. Great way to turn a perfectly understandable geriatric ennui into a statement.
Besides OJ himself, of course. Two observations on this story:
1. Welcome back to September 10th.
2. Man, has Triumph let himself go, or what?
It's Clinton By Candlelight (which is far, far less fun than Playboy After Dark):
Some 300 people gathered on Tuesday night at the Brentwood home of CAA's David O'Connor and his wife, Lona Williams, anxious to see the guest of honor, Bill Clinton.Actually, let's rephrase that. There are a lot of great things about California. Predictable electricity is definitely not one of them.Then the power went out --- in the entire neighborhood --- putting this Hillary Clinton fund-raiser into near total darkness.
The only light came from candles and some battery operated lanterns, which were shined on Clinton when he spoke in the backyard pool area. That helped, but it was still hard to see guests. And with no electricity, and therefore no microphone, it wasn't always easy to hear, according to a guest.
"There are a lot of great things about the modern world," Clinton said, according to the guest. "Predictable electricity may not be one of them."
In the above video, James Taranto discusses the difference between what goes on at the typical "peace protest" versus the staggeringly sanitized version that's reported in the newspaper. Or as I've written before, just compare the photos in Zombietime of any Bay Area protest versus how the event is written up by the Victorian gents in your local newspaper. Of course, it was much easier to keep the gates closed on this sort of thing before the Blogosphere, as Sheila Gribben Liaugminas writes in a terrific piece found via Bob Owens.
Of course, occasionally, a paper gets it right. In his Best of the Web column today, Taranto spots a Sacramento alternative weekly with what sounds like--from the headline on--a pretty accurate description of the left's busywork activities in DC this weekend. "It's the feel-good story of the season", Taranto quips.
The punchlines are endless; fire at will, boys!
This should have happened four or five years ago, but I'm glad to see that aerial Wi-Fi is finally, err, taking off in the US:
Alaska Airlines said on Tuesday it plans to launch an in-flight wireless Internet service.Bring it on!Alaska Air said it will test a system from Row 44, a provider of broadband communication for airlines, on a Boeing 737 aircraft in spring 2008. Based on that trial's outcome, it plans to equip its 114-aircraft fleet.
Alaska Air said the technology will allow passengers with Wi-Fi-enabled devices, such as laptop computers, PDAs, smartphones and portable gaming systems to have high-speed access to the Internet, e-mail, virtual private networks and stored in-flight entertainment content.
Customers connect to the system through wireless hotspots installed inside the aircraft cabin, the airline said.
Alaska Air said it and Row 44 have worked together for two years to bring in-flight broadband to market.
Nikke Finke writes, "let me review what Hollywood learned during its summer vacation"; not that they'll remember any of it. Her last observation--"Don’t expect the international box office to save Hollywood summers forever" is especially crucial, as just underneath heartland hits like 300 and Transformers, Hollywood turns out movie after movie whose agitprop tone and overt politicization is designed far more to appeal to The Biggest Blue State Of Them All than middle America.
That's a longtime practice that's in sharp contrast to Tinseltown in the last decade of the Hays Era, when its writers had to bury socialist themes deep into a movie's subtext to sell it to a largely domestic, not to mention conservative, audience. Using a subtle touch instead of a sledgehammer to tell its stories, these were often some of Hollywood's best films before the lights went out, as Stanley Kubrick once described Hollywood at the end of the 1960s.
One observation by Finke seems particularly cruel though; she dubs Nicole Kidman "the female equivalent of Sean Penn". Other than Dead Calm, her Batman movie and Eyes Wide Shut, I've managed to avoid virtually her entire oeuvre. But she seems far more appealing to spend two hours at the movies than Sean "Spicoli" Penn, based on visual aesthetics alone. And besides, she actually holds herself out as an actor, unlike a certain wannabe-pundit who slums it in front of a camera from time to time when he wants to explore multimedia.
In small-screen Hollywood news, Glenn Reynolds notes, "Looking at this roundup of primetime Emmy winners, what strikes me is how few of these shows I've ever watched -- and the even smaller number that I've actually liked", which just like the Grammys and the Oscars, helps to explain this.
But as I've written before, there's a simple solution to the networks' worries about low award show ratings:
At some point in the future, just as C-SPAN covers the bulk of national political conventions, watch for the Oscars to move up the dial, out of the over-the-air networks and into the realm of cable. Maybe E! or HBO could host them. Or Current TV.Maybe giving its co-founder so many awards lately is merely an effort to help warm him to the idea.
He takes a while getting there (all of which very much well worth your time), but David Gelernter makes a great observation near the end of an article titled, "Defeat at Any Price".
World War I created the modern world, from the map of the modern Middle East, to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which ultimately birthed not just the Soviet Union, buts also led to the creation of jealous wannabe neighbors, fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany. And as Gelernter notes, Europe's polar-opposite response to the horrific bloodshed of its World Wars: modern-day transnational progressivism (or "pacifist globalism" as Gelernter calls it in its original post-WWI form) a kinder, gentler collectivism.
Leave it to Theodore Dalrymple to square the circle, though: "Islam, the Marxism of Our Time".
Which leads to The Obligatory Exit Question: Norman Podhoretz has dubbed the GWOT "World War IV". In a few centuries, will historians view the last 100 years as merely one long protracted struggle between freedom and collectivism in its many and varied forms?
No matter how silly Hollywood gets, there's always going to be a topper. Always.
Texas Rainmaker, rather appropriately named to fluidly comment on this story, suggests in a stream of consciousness that "Yellow is the New Green". I'll simply note that between Cate Blanchett, and Laurie David and Sheryl Crow, Hollywood sure knows how to put the focus on the business end of global warming's root causes, huh?
You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't, you get zapped by campus security for getting too rowdy during an appearance by a man that some leading historians believe may have once been a candidate for the presidency.
"A man in southern China appears to have died of exhaustion after a three-day Internet gaming binge, state media said Monday."
(Via the healthy online alternative for those with pre-existing broadband addiction symptoms.)
Safe prediction: Because of this shocking, shocking news coming from his two favorite showbiz titans, there'll be no joy in the Allahpundit household this Christmas Eid.
Roger L. Simon writes:
When people ask me about my relative soft shoe to the political center after decades as a dedicated left-liberal, they usually say something like: “You’re one of those 9/11 Democrats, aren’t you? Like your buddy Ron Silver.” I mostly nod. It’s hard to deny 9/11 altered my view of things considerably. But what I almost always don’t tell them is those views were already changing - because of the OJ Trial. In a sense, weird as this may sound, the Juice prepped me for 9/11.Read the whole thing.
The NFL was one of the very few consistent bright spots in the otherwise dismal 1970s, as the league enjoyed one of its most memorable decades: the rise of the Cowboys (not to mention their cheerleaders) as "America's Team", the Steelers' four Lombardi trophies, the Dolphins' undefeated season, the "Luv Ya Blue" Oilers, etc. But it speaks volumes about the Decade From Hell and the blight that it cast upon everything it touched that professional football's most celebrated individual athlete during that decade was O.J. Simpson. And still is.
Ed Morrissey writes, "The Times of London believes that the Axis of Evil just 'threw a spoke' after an Israeli attack demolished a joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear weapons project":
Three days ago, I wrote that Israel had conducted a second Osirak, and that appears confirmed at this point. Syria has been relatively quiet after its initial complaint about Israeli overflights, and Israel has refused to deny that they conducted a mission in Syria, which basically acts as a passive confirmation. Intel shows that North Koreans had been in Syria up to that time and that a new facility on the Euphrates had more than just agriculture on its mind.As Ed notes, "The greater threat of Syrian nukes was not an all-out attack, which would have generated a devastating American response, but of a terrorist attack using smuggled Syrian nukes, for which Syria could claim no responsibility. That's why Israel had to act before Syria could put those weapons in the hands of its proxy terrorists."This operation had been planned since the spring, when the facility first came to the attention of the Israelis. The Syrians had apparently bought North Korean technology and materiel at about the time that Kim Jong-Il had started to cooperate with the West on nuclear disarmament. Analysts believe that Kim either hoped to hide his work by sharing it with the Syrians or just get as much hard currency as he could grab through proliferation. No one doubts that the Syrians would love to have nukes, nor does anyone doubt where those weapons would go -- and Israel, as they did with Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak, decided to eliminate the threat before it reached fruition.
Sally Field channels her inner Sybil:
“At the heart of [her character] Nora Walker, she is a mother,” Field said. “May they be seen, may their work be valued and raised, and to especially the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait – wait for their children to come home for from danger, from harm’s way and from war. I’m not finished. I have to finish talking … if the mothers ruled the world there would be no goddamn wars in the first place.”Doesn't this outburst infantilize those mothers who originally supported regime change in Iraq, back when Hollywood was pretty firmly behind the idea themselves?
Heck, even Sally herself once made a film to expose the plight of mothers in the Middle East. But that was also in the 1990s. Can't figure out what would make Tinseltown change their minds so drastically on these issues, but it'll come to me in time. And who knows? It's entirely possible in 2008 that they'll be right back onboard.
Just as dysfunctional as the old, pre-Lawrence Summers Harvard, Power Line's Scott Johnson writes.
Well it would be the return of the protagonist of the Death Wish movies, except, as I noted back in July, instead of being played by Charles Bronson, he's being played by Jodie Foster:
Now The Brave One's plot (confected by Roderick and Bruce Taylor and Cynthia Mort) cranks up the coincidences; and the viewer starts playing a game that's dangerous for any adult thriller: What Are the Odds? Told she must wait a month to buy a gun, Erica just happens to meet a guy who'll sell her a hot 9mm. pistol for $1,000 in cash, which she just happens to be carrying. (What are the odds?) Browsing in a convenience store, she Just Happens to witness an armed robbery; she kills the perp with the gun she JUST HAPPENS to be carrying. (What Are the Odds?) Next she's riding the subway, where she J.H. to see two black dudes harassing the riders. They approach her, and she blows them away. (W.A.T.O.?)Oddly, besides Foster, there are a surprising number of sclerotic bohemian Manhattanites, who having passed at some point in the last few decades from avant-garde to merely garde, actually are nostalgic for the bad old days. But then, there is no escape from the 1970s, in all of its kultursmog-inducing manifestations.I've lived in New York for 42 years, and as I watch the movie I'm thinking that this New York is both foreign — Baghdad without the car bombs — and familiar. Then it dawns on me: Erica, and the movie, have got caught in a time machine. Before the murder she lived in New York, 2007; after, she's in New York 1974, when the city was near bankruptcy, subways were blighted by graffiti, the murder rate had more than doubled in eight years and the mood of the people was grim and guarded. They might have cheered a citizen-vigilante.
In 1974, Hollywood gave them one: the architect played by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. After his wife is murdered and his daughter raped, he is given a gun and, when attacked, kills the assailant, then stalks the city looking for muggers to punish. Reflecting and exploiting urban anxieties, the movie was panned by critics who found it reprehensible — "Poisonous incitement to do-it-yourself law enforcement," Variety proclaimed — and wildly garish. "This doesn't look like 1974," Roger Ebert wrote of Death Wish at the time, "but like one of those bloody future cities in science-fiction novels about anarchy in the twenty-first century."
Now we're in that century; New York's murder rate has fallen back to 1966 levels; and we have a movie that wants to attach the old dread to a very livable town. [Which became that way all by itself?-Ed] The Brave One makes urban paranoia a form of nostalgia.
And speaking of nostalgia, note Time's headline, which dubs Jodie Foster the "Feminist Avenger". Isn't that merely another theme about 30 years past its shelf-life? But then, like all structural components of the American left, Hollywood's spending lots of time looking in the rearview mirror these days.
Update: Amidst her weekend roundup of movie reviews, Debbie Schlussel liked Foster's movie, with reservations.
As Orrin Judd asks, "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, once they've seen TV?"
A group called the League of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia will present a petition to King Abdullah this week, asking him to "return that which has been stolen from women: the right to free movement through the use of cars, which are the means of transportation today."How dare these anarchic feminist radicals believe that cars are their birthright! Don't they read Time magazine?!The women add: "This is a right that was enjoyed by our mothers and grandmothers in complete freedom."
As Malcolm Muggeridge first observed, there is absolutely no way for any satirist to improve upon real life for it's complete and utter absurdity.
Geez, unlike ol' Linc, at least Jim Jeffords was smart enough to jump ship while in office, thus assuring his 15 minutes of MSM and Beltway cocktail party fame and a book deal.
As the New England region completes its case of the Blue State Blues, Pajamas explores "The Vermontization of New Hampshire".
"Madonna: I'm an 'ambassador for Judaism'".
Update: "Rock & roll, we know, is sexually charged music that tends to trivialize whatever it touches, even as it has largely replaced Shakespeare and the Bible as our cultural shorthand." No doubt, Esther's ambassadorial duties will help fill the gap!
(And speaking of filling gaps...)
But it's nice to finally see the long awaited return of Mercedes Owners for Islam!
"Keith Olbermann Admits MSNBC Is Liberally Biased".
Oh sure. Next thing you'll tell me is that the New York Times once admitted they're biased, too...
Glenn Reynolds notes, "In the New York Times: Global warming is Jane Fonda's fault. Well, yeah", as the Times identifies The Fonda Effect:
“The China Syndrome” opened on March 16, 1979. With the no-nukes protest movement in full swing, the movie was attacked by the nuclear industry as an irresponsible act of leftist fear-mongering. Twelve days later, an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in south-central Pennsylvania.Proving that Pete Townshend was more right than he could have possibly known in 1980:Michael Douglas, a producer and co-star of the film — he played Fonda’s cameraman — watched the T.M.I. accident play out on the real TV news, which interspersed live shots from Pennsylvania with eerily similar scenes from “The China Syndrome.” While Fonda was firmly anti-nuke before making the film, Douglas wasn’t so dogmatic. Now he was converted on the spot. “It was a religious awakening,” he recalled in a recent phone interview. “I felt it was God’s hand.”
Fonda, meanwhile, became a full-fledged crusader. In a retrospective interview on the DVD edition of “The China Syndrome,” she notes with satisfaction that the film helped persuade at least two other men — the father of her then-husband, Tom Hayden, and her future husband, Ted Turner — to turn anti-nuke.
I’m for nuclear power, but I haven’t told anyone because I am still hoping to f*** Jane Fonda, like everybody dreams of doing who’s involved in the No Nuke movement.Me? Like the cast of The Pepsi Syndrome, I'll stick with Barbarella.
Update: Welcome readers of the Professor, who in linking to our post, adds that "Pete Townshend's perspicacity...may explain why the anti-nuclear movement isn't doing as well as it was in the 1970s." But the anti-energy movement as a whole isn't suffering all that much, as Noel Sheppard notes, bringing things full circle with the present day.
Related: The dreaded Pepsi Syndrome seems to be attacking Blue Crab Boulevard's nuclear reactor, even as we speak.
Ed Morrissey wonders if Erwin Chemerinsky and Michael Drake will be hired for Miller Lite's next round of TV ads:
If UCI has its way, Erwin Chemerinsky and Michael Drake may become the next Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner of academia. Days after firing Chemerinsky, and a few days more after hiring him, UCI has begun an effort to re-hire the legal scholar to resolve the controversy over his dismissal. Also, the Los Angeles Times discovers those who fought Chemerinsky's appointment, and it doesn't quite square with Drake's previous explanations (via Instapundit):So does that make Larry Summers the equivalent of John Madden or Bob Uecker in the old Miller Lite ads?UC Irvine officials on Friday were attempting to broker a deal to once again hire liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of its fledging law school, just three days after its chancellor set off a national furor by dumping him. ...In other words, Malcolm says Chemerinsky will have all the academic freedom he wants, as long as he keeps his mouth shut. Huh?An agreement would be an extraordinary development after Chemerinsky contended this week that Drake succumbed to political pressure from conservatives and sacked him because of his outspoken liberal positions. The flap threatened to derail the 2009 opening of the law school and prompted some calls for Drake's resignation.
Also Friday, details emerged about the criticism of Chemerinsky that the university received in the days before Drake rescinded the job offer, including from California Chief Justice Ronald M. George, who criticized Chemerinsky's grasp of death penalty appeals. Also, a group of prominent Orange County Republicans and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich wanted to derail the appointment.
Drake has insisted that Chemerinsky didn't lose the dean's position because of his politics, saying that it was only because he expressed himself in a polarizing way.
Further confirmation that Drake fired Chemerinsky for his politics came from Orange County attorney Tom Malcolm, who has worked behind the scenes to repair the damage and get Chemerinsky to return to UCI. He told the LA Times that Chemerinsky has to transform himself from a "very outspoken advocate" to being a dean, strongly implying that UCI will not tolerate a dean who engages in political activity. In the same breath, he says that Chemerinsky's termination had "nothing to do with this academic freedom issue".
Found in James Taranto's Best of the Web column yesterday:
Here's an amazing story from the Chico (Calif.) Enterprise:Why not? Jimmy Carter's best friend at the 2004 Democratic presidential convention wouldn't quibble.Bidwell Junior High School administrators said a letter sent home with students in an eighth-grade class Tuesday was a good idea for a history lesson, with bad execution.Not surprisingly, it turns out that Brooks's complaints include the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo and the terrorist surveillance program. So under his scheme, pre-Revolutionary conditions exist now only if you assume that al Qaeda is the moral equivalent of the American colonists.The letter, which appeared to ask parents to renounce their U.S. citizenship, prompted phone calls to the school from several irate recipients.
Principal Joanne Parsley said teacher Mike Brooks never intended to have parents sign the letters, or forward them on to President Bush, to whom they are addressed. . . .
Reached at home, the teacher said his U.S. History class is studying the Declaration of Independence, and he decided to write a letter putting the document into modern language. His intention, he said, was to send it home for parents to review, and possibly discuss with their children.
He concluded the letter with "After careful consideration of the facts of our current situation, I have decided to announce to everyone that I am no longer a citizen of the United States, but a free and independent member of the global community."
"The point was, I wanted to ask parents if they would sign such a letter if conditions that existed prior to the Revolution were happening now," he said. "I just wanted to start a discussion."
Found via Mark Steyn, the New Republic's longtime publisher Martin Peretz writes:
The American Left and even the mainstream of American liberalism (which includes TNR) has never gotten over its dalliance with Stalinism and its guileful romance with revolution. This is one of the costs of McCarthyism. But it is sadly true that some of the things Joe McCarthy believed and said were not false.Peretz is typically a very smart writer, so maybe I'm misconstruing his point. But it sounds--at least at first glance--like he's blaming McCarthy on some level for nearly ninety years of the left's love of all things Radical Chic, and an eagerness to ally themselves with any tin-pot tyrant with a thick-enough moustache. That seems like an awfully heavy burden for a man dead 50 years who had already done a pretty good job on his own destroying much of his credibility long before the left turned into (a) a punchline and (b) an evil thought far worse in Hollywood and academia than Stalin himself.
"WSJ: Anti-war films probably gonna tank at the box office this fall".
Geez, at least in the television industry, Hollywood airs its reruns in the summer, not the fall.
Fortunately, a much more honorable fate awaits the celluloid used in these movies.
Based on what was actually brewing at the start of WWII in America before Hitler violated his pact with the Soviet Union, this is probably less far-fetched than it seems at first glance.
Bloomberg (the liberal news service, not the liberal nanny service):
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan criticized President George W. Bush for pursuing an economic agenda driven by politics rather than sound policy, with little concern for future consequences.F.D.R. could not be reached for comment.
And in California, everything old really is new again!
James Brolin, a.k.a. Mr. Streisand: truther; ironic jerk; or insensitive moron--you be the judge!
Update: Upon further review of the instant replay tape, we have a ruling from the officials in the pressbox.
Talk about the right and the left coming full circle--and then some.
Here's Jonah Goldberg of the conservative National Review on the role the automobile played in reshaping society:
I think conservatives let their admirable attraction to ideas distract them from other sources of change. Many conservatives like to blame all of our modern ills on those horrible ideas that escaped German laboratories at the beginning of the 20th century and then mutated in French cafés. And while I think nihilism, moral relativism, existentialism, etc. have had serious consequences for society, it’s impossible to deny that the automobile, birth control pill and the telephone have done more to unsettle traditional arrangements than anything Heidegger ever wrote or said. The problem is that it’s easy to argue with Heidegger (or his writing); it’s really hard to argue with a Buick.How 'bout a Model-T then? The far left's Pete Seeger, who had no problem with technology when it was transporting people to the gulag, was later quoted as claiming, "I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other." (At least until the NKVD knocked upon their door.)
In a similar attempt at leftwing self-reprimitivization, Time magazine's Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dan Neil kicks off his look at "The 50 Worst Cars of All Time" by bolding going far more conservatively than Henry Luce would have ever thought to go and railing against the very machine that made weekly home delivery of his publisher's magazine possible:
The Model T - whose mass production technique was the work of engineer William C. Klann, who had visited a slaughterhouse's "disassembly line" - conferred to Americans the notion of automobility as something akin to natural law, a right endowed by our Creator. A century later, the consequences of putting every living soul on gas-powered wheels are piling up, from the air over our cities to the sand under our soldiers' boots.As we've noted before, look who's standing athwart history these days and yelling stop.
Update: Backwards ran the SUVs until reeled the mind. Where it all will end, only knows Gaia.
(H/T: I/P)
On September 11th of this past week, Tim Blair wrote:
The day after 9/11 a friend went to dinner with some Australian publishing types. He still works with these muppets, so I won’t identify him, but I will record his description of their mood that night.Far from an isolated incident Down Under, of course.They were happy. Not dance-about-the-room Hamas happy, but satisfied happy. America had been taught a lesson. These folk would imagine themselves to be educated, sensitive, intellectual, creative ... yet their response to the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people by fascist maniacs was to voice a smug contentment; at last, the US got what was coming to it.
Speaking of downhill racers, as Katie Couric's ratings continue their Nestea plunge even as she tours Iraq, Mickey Kaus writes:
If CBS' hiring of Katie Couric was all about damaging the NBC Today show (rather than boosting the CBS Evening News) it's working. Today "has lost about 360,000 viewers" in the past year, including 12% of women aged 25-54.And running Britney Spears videos doesn't sound like the ideal way to get that distaff demographic to return.
Greg Gutfeld on Robert Redford:
Robert Redford has a new movie out called Lions for Lambs, and get this: it's a political movie critical of America - and according to the New York Times, this really brave director is bracing for a backlash.Botox, plastic surgery and better medical technology merely cause Orwell's maxim to be pushed back a couple of decades: By 70, everybody has the face he deserves.From whom? His friends? Hollywood? The media? Snowboarders? A pride of unicorns? The other members of the Hair Club? Give me a break. The only time Redford would ever experience a backlash is if he made The Milagro Beanfield War Two: Now With More Beans. Or, if he actually said something positive about America's role in the world. Don't hold your breath.
So what's Redford's beef with the US? According to the Times, he says it's our "patterns of behavior." When you look at Watergate, Iran-Contra and now Iraq, it's "the same sensibility: winning is everything." And trying to win is wrong.
Well, unless you run a film festival. Redford hates winning, but he awards trophies to directors who enter his festival to win those trophies. Isn't it strange that in order to win such awards, you have to make movies that deride the idea of winning? If you want to win a war, you're evil. But if you want to win an award for a stupid film, you're good.
But at least someone from the Hollywood left is being honest: their careers benefit from America losing, and nothing angers them more our victory. This is why Redford made no mention of anything good America has done - like say, ridding the world of Hitler and ending the Cold War. But I'm sure he can find something wrong in that too.
So what does all this hate do to you? Well, Redford is now 71 years old, and he looks like a cross between an old baseball mitt and a dried apple refrigerator magnet. The ultimate consequence of wishing America bad? You lose your looks.
(Via Libertas.)
This is why it's typically brutal for a first-timer to run for the White House: "Obama's Latest Gaffe: Ethnic Cleansing 'Positive Thing'"
And speaking of first-timers running for the White House: Real Clear Politics claims that George Will "absolutely takes a sledgehammer to Fred Thompson" in a column running tonight.
In the New York Sun, Steven Malanga writes that it's time for politicians to promote the benefits of marriage:
Though Gotham's economy didn't rebound as strongly or as quickly after September 11 as the nation's did, the city has made comparable progress reducing family-centered poverty over that period — a testament to the city's welfare-to-work policies.Ironically, doing just that would give any of the presidential candidates on the left a pretty easy way to feign a move towards the center.Even as poverty rates decline here and nationwide, however, cultural trends threaten to pull us back in the other direction. New York faces a growing out-of-wedlock birth rate that could upend its families' economic gains. Today, a third of all births in New York are to women without husbands, many in no position to keep their kids out of poverty. In fact, half of all out-of-wedlock births in the city are to women who already are impoverished.
Rising out of poverty will be difficult for many of these women: a quarter of them have only a high school diploma, and 38% don't have even that. Under such circumstances, succeeding in our economy — which often requires starting in entry-level jobs — while also trying to raise children alone is exceedingly difficult.
True, some overcome these obstacles. But many others can't: 74% of New York women heading families still stuck in poverty have a high school education or less.
Of course, there's another road out of poverty: waiting until you are married to have children. In the vast majority of out-of-wedlock births, if the fathers of the children were married to their mothers, dad's earnings would keep the family out of the poorhouse. In New York, in fact, only 3.5% of married families in which the husband works full time are poor.
It has taken New York City more than a generation to find the political will to reform welfare, ending its legacy as a program that encourages a lifetime of dependence. Now the city and the nation face new challenges, as the decline of the traditional family threatens those least able to cope with economic hardship.
The next wave of reform must try to get men to support the children they father, as Mayor Bloomberg argued in a Washington, D.C. speech the other week: discourage out-of-wedlock births, and — dare any government official undertake this one? — promote marriage.
Related: "California marks marriage milestone: majority are unwed".
Norman Podhoretz writes, "Six years after 9/11, it's notable how little the politics of the left have changed."
Wihen the far left locked the Wayback Machine into a mobius loop dated 1972, it's not surprising that their worldview is remarkably fixed in place, despite apparently now preferring the "progressive" sobriquet these days.
I had actually read the last paragraph of this excerpt from Podhoretz before (I seem to recall David Horowitz quoting it in Radical Son), but it's worth repeating, if only for the punchline:
Having broken ranks with the left in the late '60s precisely because I was repelled by the "negative faith in America the ugly" that had come to pervade it, I naturally welcomed this new patriotic mood with open arms. It seemed to me a sign of greater intellectual sanity and moral health, and I fervently hoped that it would last.Read the whole thing, as they say on the other side of the mobius loop.But I could not fully share the heady confidence of my younger political friends that the change was permanent, and that nothing in American politics and American culture would ever be the same again. As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the '60s, I knew from my own scars that no matter how small and insignificant a group the anti-Americans of the left might for the moment look to the naked eye, they had it in them to rise and grow again.
In this connection, I was haunted by one memory in particular. It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: "Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?"
Just to follow-up on our NFL-themed post earlier today, Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett is showing dramatic signs of early improvement after a brutal spinal cord injury which occurred during the Bills' opening game against Denver.
I'd say it was all downhill from here.
Well, here's one way to build a consistent NFL powerhouse:
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has determined that the New England Patriots violated league rules Sunday when they videotaped defensive signals by the New York Jets' coaches, according to league sources.Back in 2004, immediately after Super Bowl XXXVIII, and its infamous "wardrobe malfunction", when the Pats won the second of their third Super Bowls (so far), Paul Attner of The Sporting News wrote that Bill Belichick has helped the Patriots crack the NFL code. In hindsight, he had no idea just how prescient he was!NFL security officials confiscated a camera and videotape from Patriots video assistant Matt Estrella on the New England sidelines when it was suspected he was recording the Jets' defensive signals. Sources say the visual evidence confirmed the suspicion.
Goodell is considering severe sanctions, including the possibility of docking the Patriots "multiple draft picks" because it is the competitive violation in the wake of a stern warning to all teams since he became commissioner, the sources said. The Patriots have been suspected in previous incidents.
The Patriots will be allowed an opportunity to present their case by Friday, sources said, most likely via the telephone.
The league also was reviewing a possible violation into the number of radio frequencies the Patriots were using during Sunday's game, sources said. The team did not have a satisfactory explanation when asked about possible irregularities in its communication setup during the game.
Goodell is expected to have a decision no later than Friday but that is not set in stone.
The league refused comment but did confirm Monday that they were reviewing a possible violation by the Patriots.
(Between this, Kevin Everett's horrific spinal injury, and the dog days of Michael Vick, the NFL is off to some start this year, huh?)
Back in 1989, when the first President Bush noted in his inaugural address that the Vietnam War was still dividing the United States, I thought his remarks had a whiff of hyperbole, as it was then almost 15 years since Saigon fell:
For Congress, too, has changed in our time. There has grown a certain divisiveness. We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives. And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other. It has been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter of a century ago; and surely the statute of limitations has been reached. This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. A new breeze is blowing, and the old bipartisanship must be made new again.Papa Bush didn't know the half of it.
Via Glenn Reynolds, who writes that "Everything old is new again". Because there is no escape from the 1970s.
(Incidentally, the above "peace protest" is an exercise in restrained Gandhi-esque civil disobedience when compared to this infinitely more disgusting act.)
Update: James Taranto squares the circle.
The BBC decided to set up a website explaining 911 to kids. They have several sections set up to help the kids out on understanding the war on terror the BBC way. In one section they ask, Why Did They Do It? Guess who gets the blame?Stay classy, Auntie Beeb.The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks.In the past, al-Qaeda leaders have declared a holy war - called a jihad - against the US. As part of this jihad, al-Qaeda members believe attacking US targets is something they should do.
When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.
Thats right! It is the U.S. fault! We offended the world! Read the whole thing and watch your blood boil. Not a single word condemning Al Qeada in the whole thing. In fact it defends them in non judgemental terms. As your blood pressure rises keep in mind this is aimed towards children. Hopefully your head doesn’t explode! As Paul at Wizbang says…unfreakinbelievable!
Update: Tom Gross recounts an earlier run-in with the moral children in the BBC's children's programming division.
As Thomas Sowell points out, Democratic leaders are asserting that they know about the military situation there than General Petraeus because they have to reject any signs of improvement.“We’ve heard a lot today about America’s credibility…How many more men and women will (be) sacrificed to protect our so-called credibility?”
Tim Blair: "These guys drive cars for a living. Most have no university education. Which might explain why they’re so morally advanced compared to Australian bookniks."
Lorie Byrd flashes back to 9/11/01.
(A.K.A. "the events", as our more timid souls are calling it now.)
Update: Much more at Kesher Talk. Just keep scrolling.
John Luik has some thoughts on the recent study by Robert Putnam of Harvard:
For at least the last twenty years the cultural and political elites of the United States have championed the cause of multiculturalism by claiming that diversity was something that made all of us better. Little effort was ever made to define precisely just what was meant by diversity, difference or most crucially "better." Nor was there any significant research that provided empirical support for the claim that multiculturalism and diversity translated into better people, better communities, better organizations and businesses or a better country.And speaking of Diversity's Dark Side, note that Putnam expressed a certain amount of fear of publishing his results, lest he be crucified by his fellow academicians.But now a considerable amount of solid evidence about multiculturalism is in, and it suggests that far from something positive, it is a corroding and corrupting influence on just about everything that it comes in contact with, from social capital, trust, and community spirit to altruism, volunteering, friendship and even happiness.
That's the startling conclusion from Harvard's Robert Putnam best known as the author of Bowling Alone. According to Putnam a variety of research from the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe shows that ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust, lower "investment in public goods," less reciprocity, and less willingness to contribute to the community. In workplace situations diversity is associated with "lower group cohesion, lower satisfaction and higher turnover."
Stephen Schwartz writes:
I believe, six years after 9/11, that Al-Qaida is losing badly in Iraq, and while George W. Bush perseveres with the promise he made to fulfill America's democratic legacy, Bin Laden is looking for an exit strategy. The Western mainstream media has it backwards; we are winning, the enemy is losing, the war was inevitable and honorable. And the innocents killed on 9/11 will be fully redeemed.Read the whole thing.
"Do not send your children out on railroad tracks to pick coal!"
Related thoughts on childrearing in a more innocent age here.
"In World War II, we had Rosie the Riveter; in World War IV, we have Rosie O’Donnell.", writes Roger L. Simon in his supremely timely review of Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism:
And the Bush Administration is at least in part responsible for this. I’m not saying they should have solicited the participation of Sontag or Mailer, although who knows what would have happened even with them? But the Administration had natural allies they never thought to enlist, because all of us – Democrat, Republican or Independent – are threatened by the rise of Islamofascism. They should have fought at every moment not to make this a partisan issue, because it is not. The very things the left wing of our Democratic party says they abhor – misogyny, homophobia, lack of religious freedom – are the very things Islamism represents and promotes. That should have been exploited and co-opted. We’re all in this together in the defense of the Enlightenment.YouTube remembers, at least for now.Yes, I know that’s not easy in our society where hypocrisy is rife and so many think first of their own power. Our current Democratic Party is particularly a moral disgrace in that regard, as Podhoretz demonstrates in his book with quote after quote from Kennedy, Reid, et al, excoriating Saddam and urging he be deposed, justifying their votes for the war with ringing words, etc. Now they act as if they never said any such thing, blaming Bush for supposed lies while preening for the cameras and lusting after the throne like bad actors from a road show Macbeth.
(And just to bring this post full circle, how's this for a pivot?)
To build on our post from Monday night, while the leftwing BBC clearly has issues these days, one could say that the Tories are overreacting, just slightly, to the increasingly global issue of Kultursmog.
For 58 percent of the country, James Lileks asks the question of the day:
Where were you when you heard?Here's a question for the remaining 42 percent.
This just in: Jonathan Chait is not a trained economist; and other New Republic-related fun from Donald Luskin.
In City Journal, Stefan Kanfer writes:
Under pressure from BBC suits, a drama called Casualty recently made a chilling alteration to one of its scripts. According to reports, the show’s stars “won’t be dealing with an explosion caused by Islamic extremists in case it offends Muslims. Now the bomb will be set off by animal rights campaigners instead.”But the BBC is merely a reflection of the culture of the people who staff it. And remarkably, that culture as a whole is right back where it started in the 1930s.Translation: folks like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals may be notorious for offensive demonstrations and statements. They famously dumped a dead raccoon on the table of Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor in chief, for promoting the use of fur in fashion, and threw pies at her on various occasions. But they don’t detonate bombs in subways, behead those whose beliefs are different, instigate riots and murders because of some impudent cartoons, demand special schools to preach hatred to the young, or condemn those outside their orbit as infidels. Thus, in a strange judo move, the Beeb turned the annoying but nonviolent into murderous villains, and gave the real enemy of Western civilization a pass.
It should come as no surprise, though, to see the BBC in its present state of disgrace. This is, after all, the corporation whose newsreader Anna Ford has just quit because of the Beeb’s “atmosphere of fear”; whose Newsnight presenter, Jeremy Paxman, states that his employer suffers from a “catastrophic, collective loss of nerve”; and whose editor, Peter Barron, complains about the BBC’s incessant harping on unproved global warming. It is “not the corporation’s job to save the planet,” he says. The Beeb’s future appears to be as bleak as November in London.
(Sorry for the lack of posts on such a key news day; working my way through a remarkably large project or two.)
More blowback to the New Republic in their efforts to save Private Beauchamp--and their own reputation.
(Related item just a few posts below.)
Unfortunately, the Google Gap is real, writes Mark Hemingway, who notes that "In the arms race between Republicans and Democrats to exploit the Internet as political tool, Democrats are winning."
Spy Magazine's old "Separated At Birth" column has nothing on this one.
Kathy Shaidle of Replaced Catholic now has a new URL. Adjust browsers accordingly.
The fall Internet television season kicks off with a bang:
Michelle interviews The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb about the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal. We also stop by The New Republic’s office in Washington to see if editor Franklin Foer will talk with us.
Update: Junkyard Blog asks a great follow-up question.
Related: "Army Checkmates The New Republic".
It's Mad Men: The Next Generation; Breitbart.TV notes, "Topless Woman in ‘Provacative Pose’ Billboard Shocks Even New Yorkers":
Hey, it's not like they broke the law...
Reuters: "Schwarzenegger aims at Republican center for 2008".
Rob Port: "Republicans: Please Ignore Governor Schwarzenegger".
Hubert Humphrey could not be reached for comment.
Update: "Maybe Texas Gov. Rick Perry should move to California". Meanwhile, Arnold proves that he is the embodiment of Conquest's Second Law. And increasingly, his third one as well.
Related: Back in 2003, as Gray Davis--remember him?--was melting down, Ann Coulter wrote:
California is, in fact, a perfect petri dish of Democratic policies. This is what happens when you let Democrats govern: You get a state -- or as it's now known, a "job-free zone" -- with a $38 billion deficit, which is larger than the budgets of 48 states. There are reports that Argentina and the Congo are sending their fiscal policy experts to Sacramento to help stabilize the situation. California's credit rating has been slashed to junk bond status, and citizens are advised to stock up for the not-too-far-off day when cigarettes and Botox become the hard currency of choice. At this stage, we couldn't give California back to Mexico.And that's the "center" that Arnold is referring to.Democrats governed their petri dish as they always govern. They buy the votes of government workers with taxpayer-funded jobs, salaries and benefits -- and then turn around and accuse the productive class of "greed" for wanting their taxes cut. This has worked so well nationally that more people in America now work for the government than work in any sort of manufacturing job.
Outtakes from The Preppie Handbook? The 1981 summer Brooks Brothers catalog? (I know, I know, Papa Bush is a J. Press man. Please! Stop your letters and emails!)
In any case, Robin Givhan's next article writes itself.
More from Camp Obama, where it's deja vu all over again!
ABC News' Jonathan Greenberger Reports: For three years, Sen. Barack Obama has decried the Washington pundits who "like to slice and dice America," as he so memorably put it at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.Attacking a New York Times columnist by name? I'd give that strategy a 50-50 chance of succeeding.On Friday, Obama, D-Ill., singled out one of those pundits by name: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Is Michelle Obama the Teresa Heinz of the 2008 campaign season? Despite an early warning in 2003 by Jay Nordlinger, Teresa really didn't start hitting the national media radar until John Kerry's campaign went into overdrive. Michelle seems determined to derail her husband's campaign much sooner.
Mickey Kaus writes that The Pack Is Back!
This is becoming a moving story of the resilience of the human spirit! Huntington, New York's Greg Packer, uncovered by Ann Coulter as "apparently the entire media's designated man on the street for all stories ever written," gets banned from the Associated Press in 2003. Hard times ensue. Packer is reduced to representing randomly chosen Americans in publications like the Norwood News. But--you know how this ends. A lone determined individual versus giant faceless, repressive media bureaucracy. They picked on the wrong Everyman! Greg Packer will not be not quoted. Especially by the Associated Press. Patterico has the whole emotional saga. ... Update: Packer mourns Brooke Astor for us all. The man cannot be stopped.You can't stop Greg Packer, you can only hope to contain him.
(Fortunately, big media employs armies of editors and fact checkers to prevent such grandstanding from occurring...)
Wow, it's Cruz Bustamante all over again! The Chicago Sun-Times reports:
A high-ranking official in Gov. Blagojevich's office spent nearly two years in a federal prison for refusing to aid a government terrorism probe into a series of bombings in Chicago and New York City.Radical Chic--it's not just for classical music conductors, academia, and Hollywood anymore.Steven Guerra, Blagojevich's $120,000-a-year deputy chief of staff for community services, was identified by federal prosecutors as a member of the Puerto Rican separatist group, FALN, which was behind a wave of violence and killings in the 1970s and early 1980s.
(Oh, and other than a reference to the affiliation of the person who recommended Guerra for his job, the usual Spot The Party rule applies to the Sun-Times' article.)
Every man his own TV station: as of the time of this post, you can currently see Breitbart.TV live here. It's sort of America's answer to England's 18 Doughty Street Internet TV channel, and will only get slicker as they continue to roll out past the beta test.
As Allahpundit is wont to say...Duuuude:
In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation.Did Oliver Stone write Osama's latest missive to the world?And so Kennedy was killed, and al-Qaida wasn't present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the beneficiary from the killing. And the war continued after that for approximately one decade. But after it became clear to you that it was an unjst and unnecessary war, you made one of your greatest mistakes, in that you neither brought to account nor punished those who waged the war, not even the most violent of its murderers, Rumsfeld. And even more incredible than that is that Bush picked him as secretary of defense in his first term after picking Cheney as his vice president, Powell as his secretary of state and Armitage as Powell's deputy, despite their horrific and bloody history of murdering humans.
Update: Heh: "Some five years after it was coined, Blair’s Law reaches a tipping point."
Related: Osama's past words and Mr. Rauch’s Ugly Narrative.
"The New Bin Laden Video: What Will Robin Givhan Say?"
As long as there are no photos of Osama wearing plaid trousers in 1973, she'll give him a pass.
Update: "Transcript — Osama slams Dems for failing to end war, praises Chomsky, laments … global warming". Can't say I'm surprised at this late date by the synergy of it all.
"Manolo says, Ayyyy! The Irony! One minute, you are looking like Hooters Girls, and the next you are escorting them off the plane for indecency."
Don Draper wouldn't recognize today's world.
Update: Now it makes more sense. But we'll do our best to follow-up with a response from Catherine Tramell ASAP.
Dr. Helen writes:
was reading the National Journal today and found this little tidbit by Neil Munro entitled "Shrink Liberally:"Once the left dominates a field (traditional journalism, Hollywood, academia, psychology, etc.,) they really bolt the door behind them. Tight.Everybody knows that the media and academia lean left. But these elites are bipartisan wafflers when compared with psychologists who donate roughly 21 times as much to Democratic candidates and political action committees than Republican ones. According to Opensecrets.org, psychologists gave 526 donations worth $499,982 to Democratic causes and candidates in the '04 and '06 cycles and the '08 cycles to date. In contrast, the shrinks opened their wallets to Republicans only 43 times, and gave just $22,255. Maybe that explains why some conservatives prefer prayer to psychotherapy.When the APA wonders why more people don't take advantage of all that psychology has to offer, maybe they should understand that the conservative half of America doesn't trust them to be fair or objective. Diversity is a good thing, so maybe psychology needs more political diversity. It could hardly have less.
The BBC--and who could harbor a negative thought concerning such a well researched, unbiased news agency?--reports: Guinness may indeed be good for you.
To understand how far to the puritanical left America has traveled since the Manhattan of 1960 depicted in AMC's Mad Man, it's worth revisiting this quote by David Frum:
They lit rockets in their backyards on the Fourth of July. They bought their steak marbled with fat. They smoked. They bought cars without seatbelts. They gave boys .22-caliber rifles for their eleventh birthdays. How they would gape and stare at a contemporary playground, with its rubber matting underneath the swings, safety belts on the teetertotters, and three-year-olds strapped into crash helmets before they can mount their tricycles. How they would snicker at grown men girding themselves like test pilots to pedal through the park, at a Post Office that airbrushes the cigarette out of Humphrey Bogart’s hand lest some impressionable stamp-collector get the wrong idea about smoking, at the massive Range Rovers we buy so that we can commute to the office without fear. Back then, one did not show so much concern for one’s carcass.Compare that quote with the videos that AMC has uploaded to promote Mad Men--there's something like a half-dozen different clips on the dangers of smoking, not counting the endless hectoring of the show's premiere episode itself. Did Basic Instinct have warnings on the health hazards of unprotected sex? Superfly or Scarface on the dangers of illegal narcotics? A Christmas Story on firearm safety? (OK, I guess the constant warnings of "You'll shoot your eye out, Ralphie!" count.)
And as Tim Blair notes, the bar has certainly been lowered in terms of scandal. Whereas Brian Jones and later Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had to consume kilos of illicit drugs in the 1960s and '70s for the police to bother with them, all it takes now is for Keith to light up a Marlboro 100 onstage, and it's truly Exile On Main Street time.
It's alive and well, even if it's one that many convince themselves of, rather than one being pumped out by the State.
Steve Green (back blogging up a storm, incidentally) writes:
Sometimes I have to remind myself that it's not such a big leap from Holocaust denial to 9/11 denial.As usual with conspiracies, both involve running away from historical truths too painful to squarely face.
Well, we all were--though I think I was more of a Mattel kid myself. More thoughts on boomer-era nostalgia here.
(Via the Pajamas department store of links.)
DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe: "I'm never underestimating another B-Movie actor."
(I understand the sentiment, but when did Die Hard 2, The Hunt For Red October and Cape Fear, all with zillion-dollar budgets, become B-movies?)
Huh--I thought the presidential election season was much longer this time around, but I guess the Internet speeds up everything:
Who knows? Maybe I'll have to eat my words, but I'm calling it now:OK, I've programmed both words into my spell-checker. I'm ready. But let's wait until next November, OK?The race is over. Get used to typing "President Thompson."
In the meantime, this sounds like a great place to get up to speed on "President Thompson".
11 New Jersey politicians arrested for corruption--but from which party?
As they say at the Meadowlands, you make the call!
Steve Buress writes, "The coming age of the partisan press will begin with news for the frustrated":
America’s century-old experiment with a one-size-fits-all, supposedly non-partisan press is coming to an end now that Internet content has taught news consumers that it has not been so non-partisan after all. We will be returning to the days when news outlets reflected the personal or market-driven worldviews of publishers (e.g. Greeley, Bennett, Pulitzer), and they attracted specific audiences that shared these worldviews. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Thomas Jefferson never envisioned newspapers as objective truth-deliverers, but instead as diverse voices competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas. Debate, he thought, was the best way to determine truth and, more importantly, the will of a self-governing people.It's been building quite a long time.Partisanship is now entering and dividing the press in the way that it always has in America — through the cries of the frustrated against the powerful. Colonial papers railed against the British. Thomas Jefferson founded his own paper to rail against Federalists like Alexander Hamilton. Talk radio and Fox News rail against a liberal media. And now on the Internet, the advantage is with the left as sites like DailyKos.com rail against a Republican President, united by a common enemy that is unavailable to the right (see Dean Barnett). Ultimately, emerging partisan outlets move in the direction of the mainstream to build their audiences. But if you want to watch the leading edge of our coming partisan press, follow the anger.
Dave Kopel explores how the television of the 1960s and '70s stacks up in retrospect in the cold light of the 21st century. The shows that Dave reviews are some of television's most offbeat, unusual moments; however, for the most part, network television is far more formulaic. Witness the structural elements that make up the basic DNA building block of network programming, the television crime drama:
Geez--Newton Minow didn't know the half of it!
John Stephenson writes, "Besides FOX starting out with a bash Fred Thompson session, this was probably the most interesting segment of the debate. Huckabee takes on the Conspiracy theorist Ron Paul about the surge. Enjoy":
Well, I wouldn't say I enjoyed it; the whole segment feels like a slow-moving train wreck. (Maybe if a quart or two of Steve Green's liquid painkiller would have helped.)
I'm not at all comfortable with some of the language that Mike Hukabee uses to describe America's involvement in Iraq. We didn't "break" Iraq, any more than we "broke" Germany in the spring of 1945. Those countries were already dysfunctional totalitarian nightmare states, long broken by the dictators who ruled them. In both instances we we're/are cleaning up the aftermath of decades of self-inflicted disaster. But Ron Paul's response is astonishing, as he invokes the word "neocon" in a slurring fashion as part of some sort of Oliver Stone/Seven Days In May conspiracy theory. Fortunately, Huckabee rebukes him on that.
Way to go, R.P.; take two Protocols of the Elders of Zion out of petty cash. Not to mention this lovely parting gift to watch on your way out.
Jeff Jacoby writes:
In a new study, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms once again that almost half the people murdered in the United States each year are black, and 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by someone of their own race. (For white homicide victims, the figure is 85 percent.) In other words, of the estimated 8,000 African-Americans murdered in 2005, more than 7,400 were cut down by other African-Americans. Though blacks account for just one-eighth of the US population, the BJS reports, they are six times more likely than whites to be victimized by homicide -- and seven times more likely to commit homicide.Read the whole thing; related thoughts here and here.Such huge disproportions don't just happen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned 40 years ago that the collapse of black family life would mean rising chaos and crime in the black community. Today, as many as 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock and 60 percent are raised in fatherless households. And as reams of research confirm, children raised without married parents and intact, stable families are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.
High rates of black violent crime are a national tragedy, but it is the law-abiding black majority that suffers from them most. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life," Jesse Jackson said in 1993, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
It isn't an insoluble problem. Americans overcame white racism; they can overcome black crime. But the first step, as always, is to face the facts.
(Via PJ HQ.)
Paging Dr. Freud...Dr Freud wanted in the movie publicity emergency room, stat!
Not exactly shocking news, of course:
More details--and Mit Romney's immediate broadside volley--at Hot Air.
Update: Steve Green is drunk-blogging the New Hampshire GOP debate:
First question: Is Fred Thompson smarter than you guys? Answer: If he’s having a postshow cocktail in Leno’s greenroom, he is.Ouch!
(Via Instapundit, who adds, "all this piling-on toward Fred Thompson is as likely to build him up as to tear him down.")
Duane Patterson has some thoughts on Charles Schumer's "Bizarro View Of Iraq":
And so the fall Senate session shifts into gear as the senior Senator from New York, Charles Schumer, takes to the floor after the August recess and gives his assessment of the surge in Iraq. Here's the nub of what Schumer said in his 10 minute address to his anti-war fringe and, for that matter, the remnants of al Qaeda that have been getting wiped out in Iraq over the last four months.Tradition is what the Senate is all about. And Chuck is merely preserving a distinct 35-year tradition amongst northeastern Senators.And let me be clear, the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes we have to fight al Qaeda ourselves. It wasn't that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here. And that is because there was no one else there protecting.Get it? Schumer is saying that the Bush-Petraeus plan is such a failure that the tribal sheiks had to take matters into their own hands because our military was so inept. Our military had nothing to do with clearing out al Qaeda out of Ramadi and Baquba, news that will I'm sure come as quite a surprise to the brave men and women who distinctly remember things a little differently, having flushed out al Qaeda and all.But what Schumer says is important, because it telegraphs the tack that the Democrats are going to take in days and weeks ahead. The Democrats have the same view of the military that they do of all Americans. The average American, according to the liberal view, cannot make it on their own without government programs, regulation or control. The same holds true for the military. They cannot possibly get it right if they are led by a conservative commander-in-chief.
Not only is Schumer calling the American military incompetent, he's calling them liars, as well.
While William F. Buckley's slogan was the original rallying cry for post-War conservatives, as Jonah Goldberg and Radley Balko have each noted, it's become the unconscious catchphrase of the post-JFK left, who've lost confidence in both themselves and western civilization as a whole.
Standing athwart history is the thread that ties together two otherwise very different stories in this Roger Friedman article. As the lead discusses, Leonardo DiCaprio's environmental religious beliefs are designed primarily to greatly hinder the expansion of technology and business (presumably not his, of course, but no critic will ever ask him that, lest he be dropped from the Hollywood gravy train).
And at the tail-end of Friedman's article, woe betide the man who seeks to modernize Manhattan, he notes:
New Yorkers don't like it when you mess with our history.Iggy Pop threw up there once in 1977--it must be worth saving!Donald Trump, for example, went into the record books when he secretly destroyed the front doors of Bonwit Teller to make room for Trump Tower in 1990.
New York University is reviled by some alumni as it has devoured Greenwich Village and stamped it with concrete and glass. Killing The Bottom Line nightclub was the cherry on the top of that sundae.
Last week, CBGB's founder Hilly Kristal died at age 75 from lung cancer. But last year, a person named Muzzy Rosenblatt and a group called the Bowery Residents Committee cracked Kristal when they determined to close the legendary Lower East Side rock club and replace it with something more profitable. Appropriately, they still haven't found a tenant. Rosenblatt and friends must be so proud.
Wow, while PETA is making Whoopi Goldberg kowtow profusely over her remarks regarding Michael Vick, wait 'til they get a load of this:
Sometimes I have to remind myself that this is really the 21st century.Actually, PETA might well give them a pass (or maybe not). Because it's multicultural, we mustn't judge. As Christiane Amanpour might say, who amongst us can truthfully say that he thinks that ours is the superior culture because we don't sacrifice goats to enhance jet aircraft performance?State-run Nepal Airlines employed a quaintly traditional maintenance technique when one of its two Boeing 757s had mechanical problems in recent weeks.
Airline officials stood in front of the troublesome plane and "sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god."
No, I am not making this up. The photo, which appears in Qatar's Gulf Times, shows the Airlines' officials prepping the hapless goat for the occasion.
"'The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights,' said Raju K.C., a senior airline official, without explaining what the problem had been," according to a Reuters story.
Now that's reassuring.
And speaking of Amanpour, she'd really hate this post, both for its high levels of un-PC-ness, and for the somewhat more understandable reasons that Scott Adams discussed here.
Two new articles explore the death of middlebrow culture in America. First up, Mark Steyn reviews Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built, which Steyn describes as "A music book that's not muzak":
"You can't receive all your inspiration from listening to old records," writes Wilfrid Sheed. "It's like receiving your fresh air in cans."Flashforward to the present, as Terry Teachout explores the difficult job that Alan Gilbert, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic has in store, as symphony audiences become grayer and grayer:I know what he means. Today, in 2007, we understand that It Had To Be You and The Way You Look Tonight and My Funny Valentine are great songs. They've been declared to be so, over and over. But I wonder if we'd have figured it out at the time. If you happened to be in a dance pavilion in 1924 foxtrotting with your baby and the band played It Had To Be You and you'd never heard it before, would it have sounded any better than the other hits of the day? Better than There's Yes! Yes! In Your Eyes or Oh Gee, Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, I'm in Love or Say it With a Ukulele, which was a pretty cool instrument eight decades back.
Speaking of 1924, when Puccini died that year, I don't suppose opera buffs around the world declared: "Okay, that's it. Game over." It's not always immediately clear that an art form has crossed a line, from something living and breathing to "fresh air in cans" -- a beautifully climate-controlled mausoleum. As terrific as it is to have the canon of the "Golden Age," it's not the same as having it happening right now, all around you, in unlimited supply. It's 1937, and you go to see some rinky-dink musical comedy called Babes in Arms and it's some stupid plot you can't even remember 10 minutes after the show, but every 10 minutes somebody sings My Funny Valentine, or Where or When, or The Lady is a Tramp, or I Wish I Were in Love Again, and they're all new: nobody's ever sung them before.
Even if he proves to be a conductor comparable in quality to Bernstein, there is no possibility whatsoever that he will become as famous as Bernstein.And Bernstein didn't have to contend with this:Why is this so? Because our predominantly popular culture has withdrawn its attention from classical music. The means by which a classical musician could once become famous thus no longer exist. Major labels no longer record this music except sporadically, just as the national media no longer cover it with any frequency.
* * * If we want to see a revival of the middlebrow culture of the pre-Vietnam era, in which most middle-class Americans who were not immersed in the fine arts were nonetheless aware and respectful of them and frequently made an effort to engage with them through the mass media, then high-culture artists will have to learn how to use today’s mass media in the same way and to the same ends.
Should we attempt to revive the old middlebrow culture? After all, there is a serious case to be made for not doing so: the case, in brief, for artistic elitism. The critic Clement Greenberg put it best in the pages of Commentary a half-century ago when he claimed that “it is middlebrow, not lowbrow, culture that does most nowadays to cut the social ground from under high culture.2 Greenberg's point is still arguable—but there is no getting around the fact that if you care about the continuing fate of symphony orchestras, museums, ballet, opera, and theater companies, and all the other costly institutions that were the pillars of American high culture in the 20th century, you must accept that these elitist enterprises cannot survive without the wholehearted support of a non-elite democratic public that believes in their significance.
Leonard Bernstein and Beverly Sills apprehended this, and did something about it. Perhaps more than any other American classical musicians of their generation, they did their best to communicate to ordinary middle-class Americans the notion that the fruits of high culture are accessible to all who make a good-faith effort to understand them. While that may not be strictly or wholly true, it is largely true—and an ennobling idea. I would not be greatly surprised if Sills in particular is remembered for delivering this message long after the specifics of her performing career are forgotten.
Alas, the message has to a considerable extent been forgotten by the orchestra that Bernstein led. To be sure, the New York Philharmonic, like all American orchestras, works hard at cultivating new audiences—but since Bernstein’s time, its efforts in this direction have rarely involved its music directors. Neither Kurt Masur nor Lorin Maazel made any serious attempt to reach beyond the purview of their regular duties to communicate the significance of classical music to a mass audience. Like most conductors of their generation, they saw their job as purely musical, and took for granted that its value would be appreciated by the larger community they served.
Alan Gilbert will not have that luxury. Instead, he must start from scratch. He must realize, first of all, that mere exposure to the masterpieces of Western classical music does not ensure immediate recognition and acceptance of their greatness—least of all when those doing the exposing make it clear that they expect young audiences to like what they are hearing, on pain of being dismissed as stupid.
This condescending attitude is part of the “entitlement mentality” that has long prevented our high-culture institutions from coming fully to grips with the problem of audience development. Too many classical musicians still think that they deserve the support of the public, not that they have to earn it. One of the signal virtues of America’s middlebrow culture was that for the most part it steered clear of this mentality. Its spokesmen—Bernstein foremost among them—believed devoutly in their responsibility to preach the gospel of art to all men in all conditions, and did so with an effectiveness that our generation can only envy.
The school superintendent in Amherst put the kibosh on "West Side Story" as the annual high-school senior musical after a handful of complaints claiming that the work was racist in its portrayal of Puerto Ricans. (In fact, this modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet story is the most beautiful anti-racism work in American musical theater.) "Political correctness," writes Mr. Keller, "is the signature cultural statement of the ruling elites, undermining their moral authority and driving a wedge between them and the working class far more effectively than any right-wing demagogue could hope for."Ironically though, when PC in America was in its infancy, Bernstein was perfectly willing to dynamite traditional mass culture, when it suited the political fashion of the time.
Jonah Goldberg has a must-read piece in NRO today. Two years on, he describes how a devastating hurricane and a near-universal institutional case of BDS caused one of old media's most infamous moments:
Few of us can forget the reports from two years ago. CNN warned that there were “bands of rapists, going block to block.” Snipers were reportedly shooting at medical personnel. Bodies at the Superdome, we were told, were stacked like cordwood. The Washington Post proclaimed in a banner headline that New Orleans was “A City of Despair and Lawlessness” and insisted in an editorial that “looters and carjackers, some of them armed, have run rampant.” Fox News anchor John Gibson said there were “all kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews.” These reports actually hindered rescue efforts, as emergency crews wasted valuable time avoiding phantom snipers.It was very much a throwback to the most lurid days of America's newspapers during the Hearst-era of yellow journalism. Or as I wrote back in October of 2005:TV reporters raced to the bottom to see who could moralistically preen the most. Interviewers transformed into outright scolds of administration officials. Meanwhile, the distortions, exaggerations and flat-out fictions being offered by New Orleans officials were accelerated and amplified by the media echo chamber. Glib predictions of 10,000 dead, and the chief of police’s insistence that there were “little babies getting raped,” swirled around the media like so much free-flowing sewage.
It was as though journalistic skepticism of government officials was reserved for the White House, and everyone else got a free pass.
In 1981, Janet Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an eight year old heroin addict. She was eventually forced to return the prize, when when it was discovered that Cooke cooked the books and invented Jimmy out of whole cloth. (Walter Duranty's Pulitizer is still on the books, incidentally.)Around that time, Hugh Hewitt told PBS's News Hour:Asked about Cooke in an interview, new journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe replied:
It reminded me of when I first went to work on the New York Herald Tribune and they were still laughing over the ship-of-sin scandal from prohibition days. An informant had told the Herald Tribune that there was a ship of sin operating outside of a three-mile limit off of eastern Long Island. On board you could get liquor and dope and sex. So the Tribune sent a reporter out. He didn't find the ship, but he did find a saloon in Montauk, and he phoned in about five days' worth of the most lurid stories in the history of drunk newspapermen. Half of New York City gasped and the other half rushed out to eastern Long Island to rent motor launches, until it was discovered he had made up the whole thing. These things happen about every three or four years; some reporter gets caught piping a story out of his skull...Phony stories are going to be written every once in a while, so long as you give reporters the trust that you have to give them.Especially when you send them down to New Orleans to report on the aftermath of a hurricane when there's a conservative president in office.
Well, [Keith Woods, dean of the faculty at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in Florida] just said they did not report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.And yet, despite all that, as Jonah notes:I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center -- didn't happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.
There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in their own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't.
During last week’s bonfire of Katrina navel-gazing, there was virtually no mention of the hyperventilating and inaccurate media reports, even though these facts are by now well-established. Terms such as “rape gangs” and “snipers” do not appear in virtually any of the mainstream media’s retrospectives. It’s as if it never happened.One could argue that each of those moments demonstrated fundamentally-flawed coverage on the part of television networks that claimed at the time to be throroughly objective and unbiased, during an era when the American public still largely believed such journalistic traits were possible.Why? I think the answer is complex, but three factors are surely involved. One, the media are often good watchdogs of government but rarely of themselves. While recycling old complaints about government is permissible, dwelling on your colleagues’ failures — or your own — just isn’t done.
Two, the media have convinced themselves that they did a wonderful job of covering Katrina, showering themselves with awards in response. Dan Rather spoke for his colleagues when he said, “Everybody across the board did such a good job.” It was one of the “quintessential great moments in television news ... right there with the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate coverage, you name it.”
CBS's Don Hewitt later admitted that through lighting, make-up and camera angles, he gave Kennedy preferential visual treatment in his first, now legendary debate with Nixon. As James Piereson wrote in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, when compared with the facts of the event, the media's biased narrative in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's death was in its own way as muddled as their decades-later Katrina coverage. And television's role in Watergate was largely through the passive airing of static congressional hearings. The real legwork was done by two newspaper reporters who were unknowing patsies of an FBI turf war battle spearheaded by "a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness", Mark Steyn wrote in 2005.
Those flawed earlier moments reveal both the big three networks' biases, and in CBS's case, there's a direct line from Don Hewitt giving JFK a friendly video assist to CBS's Dan Rather inventing phony documents to attempt to give a much later JFK his own helpful leg up.
The distributed citizen journalism of the Internet came to national prominence (and earned its nickname) as a result of catching that last imbroglio, but it helped that it was one big easy-to-follow story involving one superstar anchorman, not the thousand tiny cuts of the media's New Orleans debacle.
Of course, Dan Rather still can't understand what--if anything--he did wrong in September of 2004. And as Jonah notes, the rest of his comrades don't believe they made any mistakes a year later. History (and a Cuban-exile) says otherwise about Dan. In the age of the Blogosphere, what will the general public's perception of the legacy mass media during Katrina ultimately be?
Larry Craig changes his mind; resignation now more likely to occur November of next year.
As Charles Johnson writes, don't show this product to Reuters:
The field of fauxtography is getting even stranger, with new software that modifies images by removing and/or adding “seams” of less important information, allowing images to be stretched and compressed without visual distortion.Update: Of course, from Georges Sorel to Walter Duranty to Jayson Blair, to Scott Thomas Beauchamp, it's always been infinitely easier to manipulate text than images, and Curtis Edmonds writes that the Big Lie isn't going to go away anytime soon.That’s impressive enough, but the real jawdropper is how easy it is to completely remove people from photographs, with almost no trace. Stalin would have loved this.
A new technology race is developing: new generation editing tools competing with fraud-detection software.
In addition to understanding that they're attempting to gin-up support for their favorite candidate(s), keep this in mind when representatives of the legacy media trash the economy.
(Earlier thoughts here; H/T: SDA.)
To skip Brian DePalma's new film, which Chris Willman of Entertainment Weekly describes as "Casualties of War meets The Blair Witch Project", two films I've watched once (barely surviving the Blair Witch Project without chundering from all of the handheld camera work projected onto a 30-foot high screen) and don't need to see again:
If Arabs upset at the American presence in Iraq kidnapped some American actors and forced them to make a propaganda film, they'd be hard-pressed to make one much more simple-minded than Redacted — though at least theirs probably wouldn't resemble a stagy, overacted, off-off-Broadway play quite as much as this one does. On a formal level, Redacted is fascinating; it consists entirely of faked "found" video footage, culled together from soldiers' camcorders, surveillance footage, and even terrorist websites. Yes, it's Casualties of War meets The Blair Witch Project. But the conceit of having sneering American soldiers passionately plan, commit, and cover up their heinous misdeeds in the full view of camera lenses ensures there's not a believable minute in a film that styles itself as a faux documentary. By the time you get to the actual rape scenes, you may feel you're watching a new genre: anti-war porn.There seems to be a lot of that going around in Hollywood these days, often impacting the least-likeliest of movies. And incidentally, if you're Brian DePalma, and have made an anti-war film that has alienated anyone at Entertainment Weekly, a magazine that basically exists to rubberstamp all things Hollywood, you might want to get your dog-eared copy of Hitchcock & Truffaut out of the basement and start over again on page one. You've clearly made a wrong turn at the corner of Art and Politics.
Related: "Choose Your Preferred Narrative, but Quit Attacking the Troops".
"Bush Is Going To Blow Up The Bay Bridge Just Like He Did 880 In Oakland".
Uh-huh.
To build on a question that Kathy Shaidle once asked about the enormous disconnect from reality that the "truthers" suffer from, if you actually, really do believe in your heart of hearts that the President of the United States first caused 9/11 and then is randomly destroying smaller pieces of the nation's infrastructure--or larger, if you believe that he nuked and paved New Orleans two years ago...
....Why on EARTH are you still in this country? Shouldn't you be heading for the exits ASAP?
Well, it's not that new a podcast--I actually recorded this last December, just as Tech Central Station was transitioning away from podcasting back towards emphasizing traditional print articles. But I didn't want this interview with author Paul Kengor and his book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism to be abandoned entirely, so I'm sharing it here, as a sort of late summer rerun. While there are a few questions near the end of my interview with the author tied to the then-recent mid-term elections, most of the material discussed is pretty timeless stuff: how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War--and spent much of his adult life preparing for the job.
27 minutes, 33 seconds in length, 25.2 MB file size, and no iPod required--virtually any PC with a broadband connection can download and play a podcast. So click here to listen!
To paraphrase one of the great early memes of the Blogosphere: we have computers, we can fact-check those asses:
The sheets of paper seemed to be everywhere the lawmakers went in the Green Zone, distributed to Iraqi officials, U.S. officials and uniformed military of no particular rank. So when Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) asked a soldier last weekend just what he was holding, the congressman was taken aback to find out.As Cassandra writes:In the soldier's hand was a thumbnail biography, distributed before each of the congressmen's meetings in Baghdad, which let meeting participants such as that soldier know where each of the lawmakers stands on the war. "Moran on Iraq policy," read one section, going on to cite some the congressman's most incendiary statements, such as, "This has been the worst foreign policy fiasco in American history."
The bio of Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Calif.) -- "TAU (rhymes with 'now')-sher," the bio helpfully relates -- was no less pointed, even if she once supported the war and has taken heat from liberal Bay Area constituents who remain wary of her position. "Our forces are caught in the middle of an escalating sectarian conflict in Iraq, with no end in sight," the bio quotes.
"This is beyond parsing. This is being slimed in the Green Zone," Tauscher said of her bio
If you're feeling "slimed" by your own words and deeds, Ms. TAU-sher (rhymes with "her"), perhaps that's because you've done or said something slimy.
Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interviews "city guru Joel Kotkin":
Hail the working man. Another Labor Day is upon us/has come and gone. But are we still celebrating a blue-collar, industrial work force that barely exists anymore? Lots of people think so, but not city guru Joel Kotkin. As he wrote earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, the death of manufacturing in America is a myth. In fact, in parts of the South, the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest, high-skilled workers are fueling vibrant local economies and helping America make $1.6 trillion worth of industrial stuff -- 42 percent more than in 1982. I talked to Kotkin (joelkotkin.com) Aug. 29 by phone from his home in the Los Angeles area.Many of the points that Kotkin makes will be somewhat old news to our regular readers (not the least of which is this), but it's great hearing them confirmed and summarized by a self-professed "Pat Brown-Harry Truman Democrat", who sounds like he's having enormous difficulty coming to grips with the fact that that version of the Democratic Party is very much in the past.
In The New Criterion, Mark Steyn reviews Norman Podhoretz's new book based upon his book-length essay, "World War IV":
There were two forces at play in the late twentieth century: in the east, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation at home only accelerated.Read the whole thing.* * * Europe can plead demography in mitigation. But what explains our media, our political class, our “isolationists right and left”? Twenty-five years ago, the Hudson Institute’s Herman Kahn wrote a book called The Coming Boom, predicting the eponymous prosperity but also observing en passant:
Two out of three Americans polled in recent years believe that their grandchildren will not live as well as they do, i.e., they tend to believe the vision of the future that is taught in our school system. Almost every child is told that we are running out of resources; that we are robbing future generations when we use these scarce, irreplaceable, or nonrenewable resources in silly, frivolous and wasteful ways; that we are callously polluting the environment beyond control; that we are recklessly destroying the ecology beyond repair; that we are knowingly distributing foods which give people cancer and other ailments but continue to do so in order to make a profit.A generation on, it’s easier to see that the assumptions underpinning such self-flagellation are “unhealthy” far beyond environmental regulation. Large numbers of people cannot conceive of the morality of national purpose, without which it’s hard to resist any kind of existential threat. The same networks which offer drearily parochial coverage of the Olympics to the point where you’d barely know there were any other countries competing except as exotic background extras in a Team USA victory parade insist after the commercial break that in their war coverage they’re simply impartial arbiters with no dog in the fight.It would be hard to describe a more unhealthy, immoral, and disastrous educational context, every element of which is either largely incorrect, misleading, overstated, or just plain wrong. What the school system describes, and what so many Americans believe, is a prescription for low morale, higher prices and greater (and unnecessary) regulations.
Elderly comedian and Dieu de la France running on caffeine and fumes commits thoughtcrime; Will Jerry's next live gig be an appearance in front of television's favorite Torquemada?
(Via Jim Rose.)
"In other words, [Obama] voted against Roberts, not because of Roberts' qualifications, but because he was afraid it would come back to bite him politically. And for opponents of Chief Justice Roberts who would argue that his rulings have justified the left's suspicion of him, remember that Obama, based on his own judgment would have approved the guy until his advisor told him not to. And he was willing to risk that a President Obama wouldn't have to face a Republican vote in the Senate that would block his own nominations on political grounds. Quite a profile in courage, eh?"
Update: And speaking of Godfather riffs, sartorially, Michael Corleone has certainly hit the skids these days. Thank Genco that the Don isn't around to see this.
"Palestinians Launch Rocket Attack on Israeli Day Care Center".
And as Jonah Goldberg notes, "Of course, if Israelis respond, that 'aggression' will be big news here."
Small Dead Animals has one small illustration of liberal journalistic hypocrisy for the day; Say Anything has another moment of schadenfreude: "Bush-Mocking Journalist Piers Morgan Gets His", as he pulls off a brilliantly executed faceplant on his Segway, after earlier mocking a similar presidential maneuver.
I only rode a Segway once, in early 2002, for an article for a stillborn Internet magazine on alternative transportation. Having survived (embarrassing photographic proof of Segway-caused redorkulation here), I'm glad I quit while ahead, especially as Segways were originally sold to the public by their manufacturer as perfectly safe high-tech transportation. Sort of like how NASA sold the Space Shuttle to Congress in the 1970s.
Update: Via Breitbart.tv, video of the reporter "bitten by karma" added above.
More from Ace of Spades:
Once again a reporter mistook himself for a Universal Omincompetent All-In-One Expert Without Portfolio, authoritatively declaiming upon the auto-balancing of the Segway without, of course, ever having ever actually ever tried one him himself.As Glenn Reynolds as written, the Blogosphere is a remarkably low-trust environment when compared with the legacy media and its audience. Perhaps somewhat ironically at first glance, that's one of its greatest strengths.This is a sickness among the media class approaching the level of a viral mental disorder.
It means that there's actually infinitely less need amongst most bloggers to pretend to be an expert in fields in which they're clearly not. Because they don't need to generate that Oracle of Delphi tone that the legacy media seems to require in order to fake the aura of the penumbra of having Cronkite-esque institutional-quality gravitas.
Which is much easier, in the long run, on the ego. Not to mention, in this case, the rib cage.
"That which is permitted to Massachusetts congressmen is not permitted to congressmen from other states."
--Jeff Jacoby.
At age 88, with the terminal moment approaching with ever-increasing speed, Pete Seeger has second thoughts.
For Seeger, it's too little, and more importantly far, far too late, but at least he's attempting to square his record somewhat by publicly admitting that he was wrong--twice--on the most important moral questions of the 20th century.
Update: "Better late than never, but Jesus, is this late".
Heh. Indeed.
Hot Air: "The military’s showing me what they want me to see, says Couric".
Katie, CBS's reputation precedes you. When dealing with a network that makes its bones attempting to nuke presidents (Cronkite versus Johnson, Dan Rather versus every Republican since), it pays to be cautious.
Meanwhile, President Bush's concurrent visit to Anbar is proof that, like Detroit rolling out the new model year, Washington's fall season has begun.
Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog ponders whatever happened to what was supposed to be the newspapers' "killer app":
Many would decry this as the result of industry consolidation. But just because the businesses consolidated, it shouldn’t necessarily have followed that the local papers lost touch with their communities. But lost it they mostly have...In fact, many “reporters” seem to pride themselves on how detached they are, to the point of considering it an integral element of what they misguidedly see as their “integrity.” Geez, was Ernie Pyle less of a “reporter” in World War II because he clearly hoped that our side would win?A few years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote a great piece on liberal cosmpolitanism and the press that makes a perfect reply to Tom's post. Click here to read it.
Update: And to see (in multimedia form!) the exact opposite of all of the above, just click here.
Interesting discussions in the Blogosphere and beyond of the future--or lack thereof in some cases--of America's most blighted cities. Follow the links at Andrea Harris' Victory Soap for some thoughts on New Orleans during the second anniversary of Katrina. Elsewhere, Thomas Lifson, whom I enjoyed meeting at Blog*Fest*West last month, looks at "The Racial Engineering of San Francisco". Finally, this is somewhat older than the Blogosphere posts above, but Steven Malanga's recent look at the protracted blight of Newark, New Jersey is right at home with them.
When the New York Times can't even admit that communism is killing the people of Cuba, it's not going to be discussing why the last remaining holdouts of 1970s-era liberalism is impacting some of America's worst areas. Fortunately, there's a new media that will.
Update: More from Bob Owens.
Needless to say, the decline, wide stance, and fall of Idaho's Senator Larry Craig is a story tailor-made for Mark Steyn to run with--and he does, complete with a George Michaels cameo. (But alas, no Andrew Ridgley, who with his involvment in "Surfers Against Sewage"(!) seems to have a bathroom fixation of an entirely different sort.)
"Ono blasts eco-friendly cars":
Yoko Ono will never use an environmentally friendly car--because they are not as comfortable as her Bentley. The wife of late Beatle John Lennon has snubbed the Hybrid car--which is popular with Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz and Leonardo Di Caprio for its low pollution levels - in favour of travelling in luxury. She says, "Can someone make Hybrid cars as comfortable as a Bentley, please?"Say, whatever happened to "imagine no possessions"? [It died right around the same time as "nothing to kill or die for"--Ed]
I think it's because I'm just back from Vegas and have no brain cells left, that this seemed pretty funny. Though Phil Collins sure went overboard with the hair transplants, huh?
Less percussive blogging to resume shortly.
Glenn Reynolds quotes a post from Atlantic blogger James Fallows on a new book titled Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, which Glenn writes "tells a story that hasn't gotten a lot of traction in the West", perhaps because, as Fallows notes:
Fewer and fewer people can actually remember the 1930s or 1940s, but we all feel we have a sense of what the Nazi era was like in Europe. There are so many novels, so many movies, so many memoirs, so many museums, so much accumulated lore, apart from the histories and analyses themselves. Life under Stalin is not quite as amply rendered for a world audience, but thanks to legions of Russian writers everyone has some idea.I can't argue with that; two years ago, at the end of a post on Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's blockbuster Mao biography, I wrote:For obvious reasons, there are far fewer public representations and reminders of daily life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Main reason: the current Chinese government is still uneasy about backwards looks at that era. Such documents as do exist, in Chinese, are less accessible to the rest of the world than are the German, French, English, Russian, etc memoirs of Word War II.
Long before there was a History Channel, I remember when I was growing up, The World At War seemed to be on TV at least once a week, with its endless images of Hitler and the Final Solution and Olivier's baritone narration. Similarly, the end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s reminded us of how evil Stalin was. But how often does TV run anything on Mao? And when they do, it's usually benign-appearing videotape of him meeting Nixon. To borrow Applebaum's sentence about Stalin, no images means that the subject--in this case, Mao's great famines and other horrors--in our image-driven culture, don't really exist.Is that trend changing? It can't happen fast enough. Somebody alert Hollywood in the interim, though.
“The only moon landing in history is NASA’s Apollo expedition in 1968.”
Don't let Buzz hear about this!
(And in case AFP's editors are reading and they'd like to quickly bone up on NASA's golden age, here's a great place to start. Read the article, watch the DVDs, repeat the dosage as needed.)
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